Plagues & Pleasures DVD Review
Documentary About Salton Sea Explores Quirky California Community
Jun 2, 2008
“Let me tell you about a place far beyond the sprawl of suburban America where success and failure collide and where utopia and the apocalypse meet to dance,” off-beat independent filmmaker (and occasional narrator) John Waters says at the beginning of Plagues & Pleasures on the Salton Sea.
Located in the Southern California desert between Los Angeles and San Diego, the Salton Sea has a bittersweet past. The body of water, which is the focus of this film, was accidentally created by an engineering error in 1905, reworked in the 1950s as a posh vacation destination, and then abandoned after a series of hurricanes, floods, and fish die-offs caused by high salinity levels.
Salton Sea Once a Vacation Destination
At one time a vacation destination for celebrities including Sonny Bono, Frank Sinatra, the Marx Brothers and the Beach Boys, the Salton Sea is now a virtual wasteland of sunken mobile homes, boarded-up businesses, and miles of rotting fish along its shores. The film covers the history and environmental issues, but focuses mainly on the eccentric people currently living in the small communities of Bombay Beach, Niland, and Salton City that surround the Sea.
These colorful characters who live around the Salton Sea include a Hungarian revolutionary, an aging nudist, a mountain artist, eternally optimistic investors, swinging seniors, and welfare mothers. The film plays like a loving tribute to individualism, but also includes cautionary tales about land development, unwise investments, and messing with Mother Nature.
Documentary Explores Defintion of the American Dream
What defines success? What is failure? What do we need to be happy? Who really lives the American Dream? These are among the questions examined (though in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek manner of ironic comparisons and contrasts) in Plagues & Pleasures on the Salton Sea.
Working to define their own American Dream, co-directors Chris Metzler and Jeff Springer of Tilapia Films are first-time, feature-length documentary filmmakers, although they worked together previously as music video producers for which they won a Billboard Magazine Music Video Award. Released on DVD in 2007, Plagues & Pleasures on the Salton Sea won many awards, including the Robert Altman Best of Fest at the Kansas City Filmmakers Jubilee.
- Plagues & Pleasures on the Salton Sea
- Directors: Chris Metzler and Jeff Springer
- Run Time: 73 minutes
- Rating: Unrated
- DVD Bonus Features: Audio commentary with the filmmakers and Salton Sea locals; Lost Interviews; Deleted Scenes; Leonard & The Mountain short film; Miracle in the Desert real estate promotional film; Fruit of the Vine vignette on the Salton Sea skateboarding scene; LSD A Go Go short film; Consuming Fire music shot at the Salton Sea; Filmmaker Biographies; short film on the band Friends of Dean Martinez.
For a review of another unusual historical documentary, read Movie Review of Spine Tingler.
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