John Waters/Johnny Depp Collaboration from 1990 Now Available in 4K/Blu-ray Set

DIRECTED BY JOHN WATERS/1990

4K/BLU-RAY STREET DATE: APRIL 30, 2024/KINO LORBER

For the past five decades, John Waters has occupied a preeminent place in pop culture niches that revel in tawdriness, vulgarity, and social impropriety. His gleeful dismissal of conventional boundaries that separate good taste from bad, while occasionally leading to tensions with authorities of various sorts, has more consistently had the effect of making him a beloved figure, a public intellectual of sorts who so often has the perfect quip to humiliate the hypocrites among us. 

Beginning his remarkable career as a filmmaker of the utmost low-budget, indie, underground status imaginable, Waters came of age as an artist during the late 60s and early 70s, a time when the public’s appetite for taboo-shattering media and the freedom to depict truly outrageous (and also hilarious) acts on screen without fear of either corporate or government censorship were both at all-time highs. Several of his most notorious early films (Multiple Maniacs, Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble) from that period have been deservedly enshrined on home video by the Criterion Collection in recent years. 

At the dawn of the Reagan era in the early 1980s, sensing that he had just about reached the limit of the effect that pure shock value could have on his audiences, and also recognizing that he would have to raise his technical game as a director and storyteller to stay relevant in the movie industry, Waters reeled in the explicitly transgressive elements of his craft in order to continue expanding his reach into popular American consciousness. That shift led him to shoot the Odorama spectacle Polyester in 1981 (also released by Criterion), his first film to get an actual R rating, rather than the X or “unrated” that was stamped on the posters of his previous titles. And though it took another 7 years to come to fruition, his follow-up film Hairspray (1988) proved to be a genuine commercial hit, with a box office haul that just about tripled its production budget. 

Of course with that kind of return on investment, it was only a matter of time before the suits took notice of this John Waters guy – he’d established himself as a brand with a loyal cult following that showed up in respectable numbers to countless midnight movie screenings in cities and college towns over the preceding decade. Now he was showing aptitude to rise up from the underground, tidy up his act a little (but not too much), and create some buzz among both the artsy intelligentsia and suburban consumers who enjoyed the twisted nostalgia trips that he concocted from elements of his personal experience growing up in Baltimore under a guiding ethos common during the Eisenhower administration (1953-1961). 

That was the set-up that enabled 1990’s Cry-Baby to receive the kind of major financial and studio production support that would have seemed like a deranged hallucination if someone had identified Waters as the custodian of such a deposit some 15 years earlier. As the new Kino Lorber release demonstrates, Waters rewarded that trust, putting forth a great effort and achieving splendidly entertaining results. The only problem was, there just weren’t enough people on his wavelength to generate the kind of audiences that would keep his upward trajectory in showbiz moving in that direction. With a greatly expanded budget compared to Hairspray and the supposedly can’t-miss casting of Johnny Depp (who was a major teen heartthrob on TV at that time; this was his debut feature as a lead actor), Cry-Baby ended up with approximately the same returns as its predecessor and fell short of breaking even when all the costs and revenues were tallied. Even though John Waters went on to make a solid run of lower-budget films over the next two decades that continued to bear his distinctive stamp, Cry-Baby can be justifiably regarded as the pinnacle of his movie industry career, even if it doesn’t seem to have defined his lasting reputation as much as any of the films previously mentioned in this essay. 

The video below provides my extemporaneous thoughts after watching the 4K disc featuring the theatrical cut of the film (yes, he did need to succumb to the bosses before they were willing to give Cry-Baby permission to be seen on over 1200 screens in its original theatrical run.) I also offer a few comments about the 2-disc set as a whole, with an uncensored Directors Cut and all the supplements on the Blu-ray. The first four minutes of the clip kind of reiterate some of the points I mentioned above, so if you’re in a hurry to hear my review of the film itself, you can jump ahead!

As I said in the clip, my bias about the films of John Waters will always veer to his earlier works, as those were the ones I saw in my youth. His fearless embrace of uninhibited trashiness as he made them on the cheap continues to stand out as one of the most impressively implausible-but-true professional arcs of anyone working in this medium that I know of. But my viewing of Cry-Baby certainly has stoked my eagerness to delve deeper into the later stages of his cinematic output. Anyone who has fondness for this film will want to pick up what looks to be as definitive and well-rounded an edition as we’re likely to ever see. 

Product Extras:

DISC 1 (4KUHD):

  • Brand NEW HDR/Dolby Vision Master (Theatrical Cut) – From a 4K Scan of the 35mm Original Camera Negative
  • NEW Audio Commentary by Writer/Director John Waters, Moderated by Black Mansion Films Producer Heather Buckley (Theatrical Cut)
  • Triple-Layered UHD100 Disc
  • Optional English Subtitles

DISC 2 (BLU-RAY):

  • Brand NEW HD Master (Director’s Cut) – From a 4K Scan of the 35mm Theatrical Cut Original Camera Negative, 4K Scan of the Director’s Cut Interpositive (7 Minutes) and Uprez of the SD Master for the Additional Missing Parts
  • Audio Commentary by Writer/Director John Waters (Director’s Cut)
  • Bringing Up Baby: NEW Featurette with Writer/Director John Waters, Associate Producer /Casting Director Pat Moran, Cinematographer David Insley and Actress Mink Stole (38:10)
  • Pop Icons: NEW Interview with Actress Amy Locane (14:12)
  • Part of a Collection: NEW Interview with Actress Traci Lords (19:23)
  • A Few Yucks: NEW Interview with Actor and Rock Legend Iggy Pop (9:17)
  • All These Misfits: NEW Interview with Actress Ricki Lake (8:16)
  • So Tired of Being Good: NEW Interview with Actress Patricia Hearst (8:42)
  • In The Sandbox: NEW Interview with Actor Darren E. Burrows (10:12)
  • Hip To Be Square: NEW Interview with Actor Stephen Mailer (9:15)
  • Talking Hair: NEW Interview with Barber Howard ‘Hep” Preston (10:03)
  • It Came from… Baltimore!: 2005 Documentary with Cast and Crew (47:40)
  • 5 Deleted Scenes (7:03)
  • Theatrical Trailer
  • Dual-Layered BD50 Disc
  • Optional English Subtitles