Shelley, Pecker's obsessive girlfriend who runs a laundromat, seems especially distressed when the press dub her a "stain goddess", mistaking her good-natured "pin-up" poses for pornographic come-ons.

His mother Joyce can no longer freely dispense fashion tips to the homeless clientele at her thrift shop; his grandmother, Memama, endures public ridicule when her experience with a talking statue of the Virgin Mary is exposed on the cover of a national art magazine, and his older sister Tina is fired from her job emceeing go-go dancing at a gay bar because Pecker's edgy photographs chronicle the sex practices of the club's patrons.

Instead, he forces New York art collectors to come to Baltimore to see his latest photographs, which insultingly portray the same people who disparaged his family, with one photo showing Lynn Wentworth adjusting her breasts in a mirror.

[8] Describing it as "John Waters' first stab at making a mainstream movie," Edvins Beitiks' review in The San Francisco Examiner said it "starts out well and winds up no worse than most of the stuff that comes out of Hollywood".

"[10] Peter Stack of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote that Pecker is "never truly funny, but it's an amusing novelty, gaining strength from smart characterizations and sly cogency about the way people are exploited under the limelight of celebrity.