Pink Flamingos
Pink Flamingos is a 1972 film from the USA, directed by John Waters, running 93 minutes. reelscum files it under transgressive & midnight.
- Year
- 1972 · 1970s films
- Country
- USA
- Runtime
- 93 min
- Director
- John Waters
- Updated
- 29 Oct 2026
- Obscurity
- canon (14/100)
- Also known as
- John Waters' Pink Flamingos
- Banned in
- Australia
Defined in the glossary: Transgressive & midnight
Refused classification in Australia on release and again for its 1997 re-release.
Divine competes to be the filthiest person alive. The most notorious act in film history closes it.
John Waters's monument to bad taste, in which Divine, living in a trailer under the name Babs Johnson, defends her title as the filthiest person alive against a jealous rival couple. It escalates through every taboo Waters could stage and ends with Divine eating fresh dog excrement on camera, in one unbroken shot, to prove the point.
It is deliberately, aggressively disgusting, and also very funny, made with Waters's Baltimore friends for almost nothing. It is the purest act of provocation in American cinema and the foundation of the midnight-movie circuit. Know exactly what you are getting.
Trailer
The numbers
Nobody has rated this yet. Be the first to make a claim you'll have to defend.
Your call
Where to watch
No legal stream, rental or purchase that we could find in the usual regions. For films this obscure that is common, and availability changes, so it is worth checking again later.
Discuss with AI
Open a chatbot with a question about this film already typed out. Useful for a second opinion, plot detail, or where to find a copy.
Written about
- Exploitation films of the 1970s, the boom and the bust
Exploitation films of the 1970s explained through the ratings gap, the drive-in double bill, the cycles that ran fast, and the censors who cut them.
- Exploitation film examples, cycle by cycle
Exploitation film examples grouped cycle by cycle, from Freaks in 1932 to the video nasties, with the real dates, cut durations and censorship rulings.
Filed alongside
Martyrs
The New French Extremity's defining title, and the one that empties the room.
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
The coldest panel of Park's revenge trilogy, with no jokes and no mercy in it.
The Holy Mountain
Jodorowsky's spiritual epic. Every frame is a blasphemous tableau, and it is dead serious.
Audition
The slowest, sweetest bait-and-switch in horror. Miike lets you fall for her first.
I Saw the Devil
Revenge as a chew toy. Nobody in Korean cinema has been crueller for longer.
In the Realm of the Senses
The art film that shipped its own negatives abroad to beat Japan's censors. Unsimulated, and deadly serious about it.
High Tension
Aja before Hollywood, at maximum brutality, with a twist that still starts fights.
Irreversible
Noe runs the night backwards so the horror lands before the love does, and half the cinema left before either.
Battle Royale
A class of ninth-graders handed weapons and told to kill each other. Fukasaku at seventy, swinging hard.
Inside
The French extremity wave stripped to one room, one night, and a pair of scissors.
Suicide Club
Opens with fifty-four schoolgirls and an oncoming train. Then it gets stranger.
Eraserhead
Lynch's industrial nightmare about fatherhood. It played midnight for years and made him.