The animal cruelty in Pink Flamingos gets a no thanks from me, but I do love Serial Mom. Was not a fan of Street Trash, but I would watch it again.
Oh absolutely, the scene you’re referring to is awful but I still do love the movie. I was introduced to it when I worked at CVS in high school; the pharmacist loaned it to me and said not to watch it around my parents and I ended up watching it with my mom for some reason lmao. You might want to check out Female Trouble. It’s just as tasteless, and it’s plenty fucked up, but there’s at least no animal cruelty in it. Mink Stole playing “car crash” is one of my favorite things ever. Or you could try Polyester - it’s not as approachable as Serial Mom but it’s his first step in that direction. I guess it’s a riff on some German dude’s melodramas from the 1950s. It’s very funny but it’s also like an hour and a half of Divine scream-crying at the top of his lungs haha. I watched about half an hour of Street Trash (the original) a few months ago and unfortunately was not feeling it at all.
A LOT less camp, but my recommendation for the thread is The Reflecting Skin. We recently watched it for the Horror Flick of the Week club, and I hadn't heard of it until I read that Ethel Cain used it as inspiration for Perverts. It's a horror-adjacent coming-of-age film with Viggo Mortensen set in the 1950s about a child who thinks the widow down the street is a vampire, and is more broadly about "innocence" and how we make sense of tragedy as children. Lots of wild stuff going on in that one. Dark and beautiful. Feels like David Lynch meets Richard Kelly.