Sex crazed!

"A Dirty Shame" is set in a blue-collar Baltimore suburb that suddenly, inexplicably, goes sex-crazed. Actually, many of its denizens have been sex-crazed for a long, long time -- it's just that its more normal inhabitants, like Sylvia and her husband, Vaughn (Chris Isaak), have just been tuning all that erotomania out. As desperately normal as they are, their daughter, Caprice (Selma Blair), is something of a problem: With her enormous bazoongas (Blair wears prosthetics the size of watermelons -- an unintentional but fitting tribute to the recently deceased Russ Meyer) and her, ahem, outgoing personality, Caprice has gotten into so much trouble that Sylvia and Vaughn have been forced to lock her in the garage.

But then, Sylvia suffers that fateful clunk on the head, and awakens to discover that her long-dormant libido is desperate for the wild thing. Out of nowhere steps the charismatically Elvis-y greaser Ray-Ray (Johnny Knoxville, of "Jackass"), a seductive sex fiend who enfolds Sylvia in his flock of willing disciples -- which already contains many of the seemingly normal townsfolk, including a police officer whose kink is infantilization (his fave get-up is a lacy christening gown).

Ray-Ray's goal is to discover the one sex act that has never been done before, which will elevate him and all his followers to a higher plane. Meanwhile, the townspeople who haven't fallen under Ray-Ray's spell -- the "neuters," led by Sylvia's mother, Big Ethel (Suzanne Shepherd), and local busybody Marge (played by beloved Waters vet Mink Stole) -- try to put a stop to sexual tolerance, which they believe has gone too far.

While it may seem as if Waters is making a statement about society's increasing efforts to limit our sexual freedoms, I don't think he's particularly interested in anything so dull. As always, Waters cares less about the plot than he does about decorating it with gags (most significantly, a scene in which Sylvia visits a nursing home and performs a hootchie-cootchie dance with a water bottle clenched in her, as the movie tastefully refers to it, cooter).

Waters uses this celebration of licentiousness as an excuse to rustle around in his beloved William Castle Bag o' Tricks (TM), and he pulls out some good ones. He finds plenty of pockets (perhaps ultimately too many) in which to stuff old "dirty" black-and-white film clips: a leering devil pawing nubile naked cuties, for example, or a row of robust, topless damsels doing healthful exercises. Over certain key images, he flashes subliminal messages spelled out in shadowy block letters separated by emphatic dashes ("W-H-O-R-E," "H-O-R-N-Y," and, most delectably, over the boyishly innocent face of Isaak, "E-R-E-C-T"). For the soundtrack, he's dug up real-life oddities from the '50s and '60s, songs with lyrics like, "I've got hot nuts, 10 cents a bag!" (My personal favorite, the Treniers' 1952 "Poon-Tang!" is curiously absent, but you can't have everything.)

"A Dirty Shame" works itself into a cartoonishly erotic frenzy in which squirrels court and spark lasciviously, and even the town's tree trunks seem to have human orifices nestled in their crooks and crannies, just waiting to be taken advantage of. The movie isn't about our need to fight repressive society -- its view is that repressive society is merely a nuisance that must be dealt with. It has always been with us, and it will never go away, but in the end, the overactive imagination triumphs over boring old farts every time.

In the world of "A Dirty Shame," even the trees are willing participants in our sexual fantasies. And how is anyone going to restrict or legislate that?

"A Dirty Shame" is a mess -- I'd give it a 3 out of 10 on the craftsmanship meter. But it also represents a spirit of old-fashioned stick-to-itiveness and resourcefulness that even the far right should admire: The movie gets to where it needs to go by good, honest humping. What could be more American than that? In these troubled times, "A Dirty Shame" is just the movie the nation needs. It's good clean fun for unrepentantly dirty minds.

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