John Waters Teaming Up With Jeff Lieberman

Cult TV are moving into scripted shows for the first, and inevitably not the last, time with 'Til Death Do Us Part. Its a kind of torn-from-the-headlines, uxoricide-and-viricide-stuffed Tales From The Crypt, and its credentials are actually really quite exciting.

Jeff Lieberman, director of Blue Sunshine and Squirm is the series' creator. He's little known and seldom discussed, but one sticky conception of his work is that he's been a kind of shadow-Cronenberg, often exploring similar ideas through similar generic tropes. That would be pretty bang-on if both Lieberman and Cronenberg had stopped making films in the mid-80s, but since then, their paths have diverged rather sharply.

The show's narrator-host is the 'Groom Reaper' and the casting is genius. In a splendid coup-de-trash, John Waters has been given the role. He's quoted as saying "I've always been jealous of Vincent Price's career, maybe now that he's dead, I can hijack it."

Waters' characteristic bad taste goes hand in hand with his generally good judgment, and I expect his blessing for this show guarantees at least a level of provocation and healthy cynicism about matrimony.

The 'Pope of Trash' also appears in Stuart Samuels' documentary Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream, currently finishing up a round of festival appearances. Pink Flamingos is one of the six films featured in a half-hidden history of the cult cinema (El Topo, Night of the Living Dead, The Harder They Come, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Eraserhead are the other five) and it was very comforting - if that's the word - to see Waters as behind his earlier films now as he ever was - because we, the fans, most certainly are.

And falling somewhere between those two projects, is Waters other current interest: John Waters Presents - Movies That Will Corrupt You, for Here TV. He's apparently back on Vincent Price duty, hosting a series of films that might just make a flicker in the lower regions of a typical cable viewer's shockometer. The selection opens with Freeway - which I'd peg as somewhat less sensational than it's sequel, Confessions of a Trickbaby - and also includes Lodge Kerrigan's Clean, Shaven, and a package of shorter films from Christopher Munch, Guy Maddin and Todd Haynes. The full listing is available on the series' website.