One-Sheet Thursday: Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón

Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap, 1980

Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón. Pedro Almodóvar. 1985 Argentinian poster.

I’ve finally seen Pedro Almodóvar’s first feature film, Pepi, Luci, Bom, which reveals more of a punk, John Waters sensibility in his work than I even assumed from seeing some of his earlier works like Bad Education and Law of Desire and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! All of those films possess a bit of trash and sleaze, but this first film is no holds barred in its presentation of sex and gender and kinks.

Before Almodóvar became the crown jewel of Spanish cinema and before this film became a cult classic, it was polarizing in its U.S. debut in 1992, over a decade into his career. LA Times described the film as: “deliberately tasteless, punky and glitzy, unabashedly homosexual in its viewpoint and characters… a true underground movie: shot on 16 millimeter in a grab-it-while-you-can mood.” The New York Times’ Janet Maslin said, however: “It would have taken more than foresight, and not much less than X-ray vision, to detect the promise of Pedro Almodóvar's subsequent success… a rough, unfunny comedy. Most notable for its bathroom jokes, humorous rape scenes and abysmal home-movie cinematography, this [is a] reputation-dimming mess.”