Divine lives in a trailer with her degenerate son Crackers and her 250-pound mother (Edith Massey) who lives in a playpen. Divine's family is assured of their status as 'the filthiest people alive' but that designation is coveted by rich perverts Connie and Raymond Marble, who sell heroin to schoolchildren and kidnap and impregnate female hitchhikers, selling the babies to lesbian couples. They challenge Divine directly, to determine once and for all who the filthiest people alive really are and the battle is on. If you will ever vomit from watching a movie, this will be the one.

We follow the sordid career of Dawn Davenport (Divine) from teenage brat to crazed mass murderer. The slaughter begins when her parents' fail to buy her cha-cha heels for Christmas. She runs away from home and is promptly raped by a motorcycle hoodlum (raped by herself. transvestite Divine plays both rapist and victim) Nine months later she gives birth to daughter Taffy. Dawn's life seems to turn for the better when she enters a beauty salon run by flamboyant sophisticated ultra-perverts the Dashers (Waters stalwarts David Lochary and Mary Vivian Pearce.) There she meets Gator (Michael Potter), a feeble but young 'n hung hairdresser whom she marries over the objections of his aunt Ida (Edith Massey) who wishes he was gay.

There's trouble at home because Gator who is always letching after deranged car-crash obsessed little Taffy, played to insane perverted perfection by Mink Stole who must have been at least thirty at the time. Absurdity is too mild a term to describe an obese man in drag playing a young woman berating a young man for lusting after her little girl played by an actress who's clearly older than either of them. The Dashers are obsessed with the beauty of crime and ugliness and have a clandestine baby farm in their posh home. (They keep kidnapped girls chained up in the basement and impregnate them with a syringe.) Soon they are egging Dawn on to horrible (but "beautiful") crimes. After Dawn is horribly disfigured she becomes a murderous fashion sensation of ugliness before her inevitable rendezvous with the electric chair.

When brittle hysteric housewife Peggy Gravel (Mink Stole) comes home from the mental hospital her quiet suburban Baltimore home seems a house of horrors. She is soon convinced that she's under attack from neighborhood kids and that her five-year-old daughter is pregnant.

When her long-suffering husband comes home she decides he's trying to kill her and starts beating him wih a lamp. When the poor man feebly begs for help she shrieks, "He's attacking again!" Finally she coerces her obese maid, Grizelda (Jean Hill), to suffocate him with her sizable bottom and Peggy and Grizelda take it on the lam.

After being hilariously molested by the police and adding to their list of crimes the duo head to the last stop for criminals and social outcasts, Mortville, a bizarre off-the-map shantytown where they find lodging with a predatory lesbian ex-wrestler and her murderess lover.

Ruthless and demonstrably retarded tyrant Queen Carlotta (Edith Massey) rules the kingdom of Mortville with the assistance from a cranky pre-op transsexual (Susan Lowe) and her hot-pants lover (Liz Renay). Carlotta's daughter, Princess Coo-Coo (Mary Vivian Pearce) wants to renounce the throne and marry a nudist garbageman, so the Queen has him killed and enlists Peggy's aid in infecting the kingdom with rabies.

Production designer Vincent Peranio created the entire village with no budget, resulting in a surreal hybrid of school play, CABINET OF DOCTOR CALIGARI and Fairy-Tale Village.

Mentally deficient Edith Massey is phenomenal. Watching her wield ultimate political power will awaken the anarchist in the most autocratic viewer, just as her turn as an imbecilic but suddenly rich cleaning lady in POLYESTER (spouting garbled French) made communism seem almost attractive.

Waters' inspiration here is the 1950s "women's picture," a genre of cinematic soap opera that subjected stoic heroines (often Joan Crawford) to an outlandish escalating hail of heartbreak and betrayal.

Divine plays Francine Fishpaw, an obese upper middle class suburban housewife. Francine loves her hideous family, but they don't love her. When her abusive farting porno theater operator isn't with his mistress (Mink Stole) he's mortifying Francine by battling with the anti-porn picketers on their front lawn. Her daughter is a fast little idiot working her way up to prostitute. (She performs lewd dances in her high school cafeteria for quarters) Her son is a violent serial sex offender, stomping on women's high-heeled feet in public places. Her mother is a vicious shrew. Her best friend Cuddles (Edith Massey) is a retarded woman who inexplicably inherited millions (and is a hilarious indictment of inherited wealth).