By Edwardo Jackson

BIASES: late 20s black male; frustrated screenwriter who favors action, comedy, and glossy, big budget movies over indie flicks, kiddie flicks, and weepy Merchant Ivory fare

MOVIE BIASES: Easily the most peculiar director in America.MAJOR

PLAYERS: Johnny Knoxville (Walking Tall), Tracey Ullman (Small Time Crooks), Selma Blair (Hellboy), and writer/director John Waters (Pecker) WARNING: This review is for mature audiences only, preferably those with a sense of humor and are impervious to the childish, sexual behavior for which John Waters is known. Mental supervision is strongly advised.

Sylvia Stickles (Ullman) seems to be your average Harford Road section of Baltimore resident: she has a horndog husband Vaughn (Chris Isaak), an ex-porn star daughter Caprice (Blair) with enormous breasts under house arrest above her garage, and a repressed mother named Big Ethel (Suzanne Shepherd) who thinks the world has gone to Hell in a handbasket. Just wait, Big Ethel. When an accident causes Sylvia to bump her head, she's visited by an almost ethereal Jesus of sex addicts, tow truck driver Ray-Ray Perkins (Knoxville), who unlocks her bottled up sexual power. Like an airborne disease, everyone's bumping into things and tapping into their carnal lusts, with the town starting to look like a "Dawn of the Dead" style zombie nation of sex addicts. Their goal? To follow Ray-Ray on his quest to liberate the repressions of their community in order to unearth that one new sex act. And you thought "The Manchurian Candidate" was deep.

Let's make no bones about it: John Waters is a special (re: touched) individual. Moderation means nothing, subtlety is pure anathema to his desires. Loving his hometown of Baltimore like I love kung pao chicken, Waters is the proud creator of his self-proclaimed "celluloid atrocities," of which "Shame" is the newest, bizarrely creative yet mainstream inaccessible one – classic Waters. As if he opened up a New England Journal of Medicine book of sexual dysfunction, Waters goes to town in profiling every perverse condition that you and I have never heard of. Excess, excess, excess: fondling ground meat, smothering oneself in convenience store food, an over-the-top clan of gay male "bears"…You name it, Waters defiles it.

That's not to say that parts of this film are without merit. In this day and age of high-minded, jingoistic, sexuality-censoring "freedom" of expression, a movie with the ideals of exposing our own hypocritical, damagingly prudish nature is just downright American. Waters mocks our overly sanitized, more-and-more-repressive-by-the-day culture with lines like "We're for the end of tolerance" and "I can't control my Axis of Evil!" in the midst of his summer Olympiad of sexual deviance. Post Janet Jackson Nipplegate, the conservative, Bible-thumping religious right thought Gestapo that's oh so acutely satirized in "Saved!" to fear sex more than violence will have a field day with this movie. Looking more and more like an extension of that ideology, the MPAA has already slapped an almost unmarketable NC-17 rating on "Shame," the equivalent of an artistic X and a box office death knell if there ever was one.

No matter. Even if someone was asleep at the wheel at the ratings board and somehow gave it a PG-13 or an R, "Shame" is too lewd, too nutty, and too WATERS for its own good. You know any movie with Johnny Knoxville and Tracey Ullman as your leads is gonna be weird. Triscuit-thin Selma Blair's Caprice (porn name: Ursula Udders) toting huge plastic breasts is the ultimate, perverse oxymoron. A bunch of sex zombies on a rampage of "carnal rapture" claiming "the resurrsex-tion is coming" (pun intended, I'm sure) is definitely on the wrong side of the precipice of good taste. Believe me, there's a laundry list of featured indecencies that are entirely unprintable. Waters may have good intentions, but he has absolutely no mental, visual, or social editor. For that alone, he makes me proud to be an American. Doesn't mean I want to watch his movies, though.

"Let's go sexin'!" cries Ray-Ray and his horned-up followers. Um thanks, but…let's not.