Who'd have thought John Waters could make sex seem so tedious? The campy writer-director's latest comedy, A Dirty Shame, is touted as a return to the gross-out roots of his early work, like Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble. The trouble with A Dirty Shame isn't that it's gross; in a post-Farrelly cinescape, few things have the ability to truly gross out audiences. Not that Waters doesn't try—at times the entire point of the film seems to be to see how many obscure sexual fetishes and euphemisms for oral sex he can put on screen.
The trouble with the movie, about repressed suburban housewife Sylvia Stickles (Tracey Ullman) who becomes a sex addict after getting conked on the head during a traffic accident, is that it's repetitive, uninteresting, plotless and not funny. Sylvia hooks up with a group of fellow sex addicts led by Jesus figure Ray-Ray (Johnny Knoxville) and together they terrorize their uptight Baltimore suburb.
Subtlety has never been Waters' strong suit, but Shame tries so hard to be shocking that it gets tired after five minutes. There might have been an amusing short film to be made out of characters like Selma Blair's giant-breasted Ursula Udders, but at 90 minutes, it's about as enjoyable (and sexy) as a prostate exam.