Polyester

March 24 · Regal Riviera · 8:00 P.M.

John Waters, 1981, 86 minutes

Odorama cards will be available to the first 100 attendees.

“I would never want to live anywhere but Baltimore. It’s as if every eccentric in the South decided to move north, ran out of gas in Baltimore, and decided to stay.” — John Waters

Francine Fishpaw (Divine) is at the end of her rope. Her porn-theatre owning husband is having an affair, her teenage daughter is pregnant, and her son is terrorizing women in town by stomping their feet. Can Francine’s hard-won suburban respectability be regained? With the help of her best friend Cuddles (the one-and-only Edith Massey) and the dreamy hunk Tomorrow (Tab Hunter), she just might.

Baltimore-based auteur John Waters draws the technicolor suburban melodramas of the 1950s filmmakers like Douglas Sirk to create a campy comic attack on bourgeois values. But an equally inspired influence are the expanded cinema gimmicks of William Castle (The Tingler) and the 1960 Smell-O-Vision feature Scent of Mystery.

In his updating of the latter, Waters presents Polyester in Odorama. Moviegoers in the film’s original theatrical run were given a scratch-n-sniff card with ten repellant fragrances to offend their olfactory sensibilities. While Odorama cards were out of print for many years, we are happy to present Polyester with Odorama cards — just as it was originally meant to be seen, heard, and smelled.

Dubbed the “Pope of Trash” and the “Prince of Puke”, filmmaker, author, critic, and visual artist John Waters has been writing and directing films since the 1960s, every one of them set and shot in his native Baltimore. Though he made a name for himself with the infamous Pink Flamingos and later found mainstream success with Hairspray, Polyester is Waters at his stinking best.

Further Reading:

• The Nose Knows: John Waters’ Brilliant ‘Odorama’ Gimmick in Polyester Remembered