Everything that might be said about this John Waters extravaganza was, or could have been, said already about his Hairspray. Both the good and the bad, albeit the good here is a little less good and the bad a little worse. There is again a museum's worth of period clothes and cars and hairdos and dance-steps and whatnot, though the particular period -- nearly a decade earlier than Hairspray's, in the earliest days of rock-and-roll -- banishes the race-relations angle that gave Hairspray such a special cheekiness, and leaves us instead with a good-girl-bad-boy plotline insufficiently different from so mainstream an item as Grease. The color occasionally puts up (but doesn't keep up) a pretty good approximation of 1950s Technicolor (but why is the Universal Pictures logo at the outset not the color one of the Fifties but a black-and-white one of the Thirties?). And there is again, also, a truly broad and detached and -- one might even say -- historical perspective that dovetails neatly with a genuinely blasé and laissez-faire liberalism. On the other -- the bad -- hand, Cry-Baby too often resembles a kind of rock-and-roll Hee Haw. (Maybe, that is to say, a kind of Sha Na Na, with "special guest star" Debby Boone.) Any parody, in any art form, depends upon a delicate tension between the original and its distortion, between the model and its unlikeness, between what's true and how far the truth can be stretched. Waters has no stomach for such tension, not to mention such delicateness. That inveterate freeness-and-easyness of his, which is one of his modest virtues in the social sphere, thereby becomes one of his major vices in the artistic one. And then, too, any parody (or most any parody) depends on brevity: the broader the parody, the briefer it had better be. And with Waters throwing an elbow relentlessly to the ribs, he fouls out of the ballgame before halftime. Johnny Depp, Amy Locane, Polly Bergen, Traci Lords, Ricki Lake, and Patricia Hearst. (1990) — Duncan Shepherd