A Salute to Subversiveness

What better place to launch a broadside at mindless mainstream movies than from within a mainstream movie? John Waters, Baltimore’s master of subversive cinema, knows this better than anyone as he takes aim at big-deal, big-screen bores and all other manner of Hollywood excesses in “Cecil B. DeMented,” a fast, furious and funny fusillade of a movie.

Yes, it celebrates guerrilla-style filmmaking, but it’s also an uproarious, smartly crafted, hard action flick with a certified Hollywood star, Melanie Griffith. You don’t need to know film history to kick back with “Cecil,” but it can’t be denied that catching a glimpse of a marquee proclaiming “Les Enfants du Paradis--The First Time in English” offers a special jokey horror.

Griffith plays Honey Whitlock, a spoiled, bitchy show-biz veteran who has come to Baltimore, “a dump of a town” in her view, for the benefit premiere of her latest movie, “Some Kind of Happiness.” Honey gets her kicks from making everybody jump through hoops, but she’s right on when she has an ominous premonition as a white limo pulls up to her luxury hotel to take her to the premiere.

“White limos are for Liberace’s lover,” she declares haughtily, pointing out that a black limo is in her contract.

In any event, Honey has barely started on her sugary onstage speech when she is seized by a pack of “cinema terrorists,” one Cecil B. DeMented (Stephen Dorff) and his crew, the Sprocket Holes, and whisked off to the city’s vast old derelict Hippodrome, where Cecil is making his movie and simultaneously plotting a revolution against mainstream pictures, which he will film as part of his own movie. Honey, now in punker gear, is to star as the beleaguered proprietor of an art theater that’s threatened with extinction.

Honey, targeted not only because she has conveniently come to town but also because she represents all that Cecil hates about Hollywood, is none too happy to become a kidnap victim. The Sprocket Holes, a grungy collection of punkers, dopers, radical gays, a porn actress and a Satanist, are intimidating to say the least, each one sporting the tattooed name of a favorite Waters director, from schlockmeister Herschell Gordon Lewis to such auteurs as Almodovar, Fassbinder and Preminger. (A large-format book on David Lean, however, serves as a target for sharpshooter practice.)

The Hippodrome interior has been transformed by Waters’ long-time production designer Vincent Peranio into an intricate and intriguing work space, set and living quarters created from junk and thrift shop treasures. Other Waters veterans turn up on screen: Ricki Lake as Honey’s hapless assistant, Mink Stole as the premiere chairman and Patricia Hearst as the concerned mother of one of the Sprocket Holes.

DeMented more than lives up to his name, and Honey, no fool and a pro after all, starts giving her best performance in years. She’s further egged on by a Time magazine review of “Some Kind of Happiness” that finds her past her prime to be carrying such a picture, a sure-fire $30-million loser. Honey begins to start seeing things from DeMented’s point of view, crazed as he is by pointless sequels, video game adaptations, Hollywood remakes of foreign films and old TV series. Wouldn’t you know that the Maryland Film Commission, Waters’ long-ago nemesis, is making a big fuss over a Baltimore-made sequel to “Forrest Gump”?

Waters pokes fun at DeMented et al, too, but with affection. As hilariously zany as “Cecil” is, it is charged with a passion and energy beyond most of Waters’ ventures into mainstream production; all that Waters protests in such scabrous fashion is clearly a matter of conviction for him.

Cecil B. DeMented, played to the hilt by Dorff, really is ready to die for his beliefs and to get his movie made. And this film is Waters’ tip of the hat to the outlaw cinema from which he emerged. He’s managed to stay true to it arguably better than anyone else who emerged from American underground cinema.

* MPAA rating: R, for strong, crude sexual content, violence, language and drug use. Times guidelines: Violence and language are strong; sexuality crude but brief.

‘Cecil B. DeMented’

Melanie Griffith: Honey Whitlock

Stephen Dorff: Cecil B. DeMented

Alicia Witt: Cherish

Adrian Grenier: Lyle

An Artisan Entertainment presentation in association with Le Studio Canal Plus. Writer-director John Waters. Producers John Fiedler, Joe Caracciolo Jr., Mark Tarlov. Executive producers Anthony DeLorenzo, Fred Bernstein. Cinematographer Robert Stevens. Editor Jeffrey Wolf. Costumes Van Smith. Production designer Vincent Peranio. Art director Robert Simons. Set decorator Barbara Haberedt. Running time: 1 hour, 28 minutes.

At selected theaters.

Note: at the Regent Showcase, 614 N. La Brea Ave., “Cecil B. Demented” will also screen at midnight Saturdays through Sept. 2, launching “Celluloid,” a weekend after-hours showcase. Following the midnight screening will be a mix of club music, refreshments, special added attractions and at 2:30 a.m. a vintage Waters film: “Pink Flamingos” (Saturday), “Polyester” (Aug. 19), “Desperate Living” (Aug. 26) and “Hairspray” (Sept. 2). $10. (323) 934-1770.