Polyester
- warm
- brisk
- inventive
- funny
Warm, kinetic, measured comedy / cult, inventive in texture. Ambivalent, intimate, measured, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.
How every film is hand-scored →Blessed with a keen sense of smell and cursed with a philandering pornographer husband, a parasitic mother, and a pair of delinquent children, the long-suffering Francine Fishpaw turns to the bottle as her life falls apart -- until deliverance appears in the form of a hunk named Todd Tomorrow. Originally screened with "Odorama" scratch and sniff cards so the audience could (at their own risk) smell along with the film.
Our read · Polyester (1981) reads as a warm, kinetic, inventive comedy · cult · waters entry — measured in intensity, intimate in scope, measured in temperature, ambivalent in outlook, with a strong directorial signature. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.
Availability in the UK · via JustWatch
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The shape of Polyester
What watching it is actually like.
“You want John Waters suburban chaos with Odorama smells, Divine, and trashy redemption.”
Skip it tonight — Skip if gross-out smell gags, cocaine farce, and Baltimore vulgarity offend your couch crew.
The reading.
Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.
Eight films that read most like this one.
Closeness in the twelve-axis space — how the film actually reads, not “people also liked.”
Discussion
What does your Movie DNA look like?
Rate a few films you've seen. We map your taste across the same twelve axes and find the films you'll actually want to watch tonight.
Calibrate yourself