Plot
Peggy Gravel (Mink Stole), a neurotic, delusional, suburban housewife, and her overweight maid, Grizelda Brown (Jean Hill), go on the lam after Grizelda smothers Peggy's husband, Bosley (George Stover), to death. The two are arrested by a cross-dressing policeman (Turkey Joe) who gives them an ultimatum: go to jail or be exiled to Mortville, a filthy shantytown ruled by the evil Queen Carlotta (Edith Massey) and her treasonous daughter, Princess Coo-Coo (Mary Vivian Pearce).
Peggy and Grizelda choose Mortville, but still engage in lesbian prison sex. They become associates of self-hating lesbian wrestler Mole McHenry (Susan Lowe), who wants a sex change to please her lover, Muffy St. Jacques (Liz Renay). Most of Mortville's social outcasts—criminals, nudists, and sexual deviants—conspire to overthrow Queen Carlotta, who banishes her daughter, Coo-Coo, after she elopes with a garbage collector (George Figgs), who is later shot to death by the guards. Coo-Coo hides in Peggy and Grizelda's house with her dead lover. When Peggy betrays Coo-Coo to the Queen's guards, Grizelda fights them, and dies when the house collapses on her. Peggy, however, joins the queen in terrorizing her subjects, even infecting them (and Princess Coo-Coo) with rabies.
Eventually, Mortville's denizens, led by Mole, overthrow Queen Carlotta and execute Peggy by shooting a gun up her anus. To celebrate their freedom, the townsfolk roast Carlotta on a spit and serve her, pig-like, on a platter with an apple in her mouth.
Read more about this topic: Desperate Living
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“After I discovered the real life of mothers bore little resemblance to the plot outlined in most of the books and articles I’d read, I started relying on the expert advice of other mothers—especially those with sons a few years older than mine. This great body of knowledge is essentially an oral history, because anyone engaged in motherhood on a daily basis has no time to write an advice book about it.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)