Pecker

Starring: Edward Furlong, Christina Ricci, & Lili Taylor

Rating: 1 1/2 out of 5 stars

If you've never seen a John Waters film, then you don't know every penis joke in the book. For nearly four decades, the Hairspray creator has made a career out of letting people know he's gay, through odd ball characters, weird story lines, and every innuendo in the book. Pecker is the story of obsession, weather it's about the main character's obsession with photography, his girlfriends obsession with her laundromat, or his managers obsession with him, everyone has a strange obsession. Pecker (Edward Furlong) is a teenager from the small town of Baltimore, Maryland, who has been taking pictures for years. Finally, he's having a show at the fast food restaurant he works at and to everyone's surprise, a New York City gallery owner shows up to make Pecker he new protege. The whole family goes to the big city, where Pecker becomes a star, putting his town and his whole family under a microscope. As is common in Water's films, the characters are as strange as can be, and for the life of me, I can't figure out why he decided to portray Baltimore as a small town. Edward Furlong stars as Pecker, and even though he has long been one of my favorite actors, even he couldn't save this film. I like weird and admire something different, but Pecker was so far out there, that it became a farce of itself. The characters are uninteresting, the penis jokes are old, and the obsessions are just so above and beyond believable that it turns the whole film into one bad joke. As I said everyone is obsessed with something and that really foreshadows the main story. From his grandmother who talks to the virgin Mary to his sister who is the biggest gay pimp in Baltimore, all the obsessions blend into one big gay, confusing, ridiculous ending. I've seen several John Waters films and for the most part have found them to be pretty funny, but Pecker is just so far out there, that it's almost unwatchable.