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Content Warning: This short contains some strong language.
A body-builder’s internal monologue grows more intense as he flexes in front of a mirror.
Shakespeare’s Sh*tstorm
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Screening online for Canadians at 2020’s online Fantasia Film Festival
DIRECTED BY: Lloyd Kaufman
FEATURING: Lloyd Kaufman, Kate McGarrigle, Erin Miller, Monique Dupree, Abraham Sparrow, Amanda Flowers
PLOT: Very loosely following the plot of Shakespeare‘s “The Tempest,” the story involves a party ship packed with pharmaceutical executives washed up on the shores of Troma, New Jersey, after a storm of whale feces.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: You’ll get more out of it if you know “The Tempest” (and know Troma well enough to catch Easter eggs like the “Kabuki flip”)—but, Shakespeare’s Shitstorm should shock and amaze anyone with a sense of cinematic adventure and strong stomach. It’s one long hedonistic orgy of grossout comedy and Bardic references. It’s got Lloyd Kaufman in two roles, including one in drag (in a Snow White costume, for reasons never explained); William Shakespeare telling a donkey show joke to a panel of Ph.Ds; and a climax that is accurately characterized as “like a Hieronymus Bosch painting” (if Bosch had been just a bit fonder of green slime, prosthetic boobs, and punk rock anthems). It’s the stuff that dreams are made of—at least, the kind of dreams you might have if you ate an entire herring pizza laced with ketamine as a midnight snack before going to bed.
COMMENTS: “The Tempest” was not William Shakespeare’s final play, but it was his last masterpiece. Its closing acts are widely interpreted as the Bard’s farewell to the theater. At 74 years of age, Lloyd Kaufman has already outlived Shakespeare, but the feeling that Shakespeare’s Shitstorm is intended as his final trashterpiece is inescapable.
Something about Shakespeare inspires Kaufman and his Troma team to heights of lunacy even beyond their usual excesses. Shitstorm may not be quite as surreal as Troma’s weirdest feature, Tromeo & Juliet, but it represents a capstone of their transgressive punk aesthetic. One affinity between Stratford-upon-Avon’s favorite son and New Jersey’s least reputable film studio is the large cast of characters: Troma has always favored maxamilized plots and as many odd-looking extras as they can convince to work for a mention in the rolling credits. The discipline (such as it is) imposed by being forced to parody the Bard’s sprawling plots enforces some structure on Kaufman, whose tendency is to make his movies as digressive and improvised-looking as possible. And of course, the tension between Shakespeare’s humanistic aspirations and Troma’s scurrilous antics is inherently amusing. The combination gives the studio the chance to argue, “sure, we may be lowbrow… but we’re smart lowbrow.” After all, they quote from the play’s text and throw in references to other plays and sonnets (always undercut by a corny or obscene joke), along with bits of Shelley and bawdy couplets of their own devise. It reminds us that there is an intelligence hiding under the layers of shit jokes.
Shakespeare’s Shitstorm isn’t just offensive; it’s an ode to offensiveness. It starts off with a toddler spattered with blood from her mother’s suicide. There’s a “diversity hire” stripper in a wheelchair, two separate subplots involving crack whores (including one who sings a musical number with the lines “suck her in and blow her out, my crack pipe never screams and shouts”), and bloody oral rape scene performed by an animatronic chicken. After all that, the nauseating scenes of characters getting lapdances while being showered by brownish buckets of cetacean “fecal bloom” seem positively quaint. The only real suspense is whether—or rather, when and how—they’ll drop the N-word. That’s all standard practice for Troma, though I daresay that Shitstorm breaks all previous Tromatic records for repulsion. But this time, offensiveness itself is the front-and-center theme of the movie; it makes the studio’s boldest case that causing offense is a social service. Shitstorm‘s chief satirical targets are entitled “SJW” bloggers with no sense of humor. Shitstorm‘s final moral is delivered as a string of ethnic jokes—with accompanying visual metaphor—an argument that mocking everyone and everything equally is a better route to solidarity than contorting our speech awkwardly to avoid stepping on any one group’s toes. In other words, lighten up. We’re all here to laugh, and if your in-group gets lambasted, it will be someone else’s turn in about 30 seconds.
And thankfully, the movie is funny. They even insert what I think is a joke for early reviewers only. Often, when you watch pre-release screeners, there will be a legend that periodically appears warning “for review purposes only.” In Shitstorm, that reminder instead reads “for bootlegging purposes only.”
Shakespeare’s Shitstorm is a monumental movie. When you sit through the nine minutes of end credits—taking care to watch those amazing outtakes and read the jokes hidden in the text—you’ll realize that it takes an enormous pile of money to make something that looks this cheap. We are unlikely to see a Lloyd Kaufman movie on this scale ever again, and it’s a shame that Covid-19 prevented it from having the grandiose premiere to a packed house that it deserved. Troma has worked its way up from a disreputable B-movie studio to an underground institution. I haven’t always been the biggest fan of their approach, but Kaufman and team have worked ceaselessly doing their own thing their own way for 35 years now—and that deserves a celebration. Of course, Kaufman’s Prospero might actually like it better this way. He doesn’t deal well with sudden popularity near the end of Shitstorm: “You’re supposed to be triggered! Do not put me on a pedestal!” So instead, let’s send him off with a quote from Shakespeare: “As you from crimes would pardon’d be,/Let your indulgence set me free.” We’ll indulge you, Mr. Kaufman, in one last glorious barf fest.
Four years after the release of MeTube 2, the bondage opera performers from outer space are back again.
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Screening online for Canadians at 2020’s online Fantasia Film Festival
DIRECTED BY: Minoru Kawasaki
FEATURING: Keisuke Ueda, Ayano Christie Yoshida
PLOT: Someone steals Yuta’s temple offering of a squid, an octopus, and a crab, and soon giant versions of these three creatures begin terrorizing Japan; an anti-squid squad is formed to combat the menace.
COMMENTS: If you’re looking for a light kaiju appetizer that won’t ruin your appetite for more substantial fare, Monster Seafood Wars may be your dish. Minoru Kawasaki’s spoof follows a sushi delivery boy/genetic engineering prodigy Yuta as his stolen seafood goes bad in unanticipated ways. Along the way he joins a monster-fighting squad, attempts to woo his love interest away from a rival, and tries out a mouthwatering array of kaiju sushi dishes.
Unfortunately, the film is poorly paced, with too much exposition and too few battles stuffed into in the first thirty minutes. Monster Seafood Wars drops in a number of documentary-style retrospective interviews throughout its runtime, which, while not too intrusive, rarely add much beyond a bit of unnecessary pseudoscientific explication. They feel mostly like padding. When monster tentacles are sliced off during a battle—and are subsequently found to be delicious—the film’s middle section takes a long foodie detour as kaiju cuisine mania grips Japan. These segments may be parodies of actual Japanese cooking shows, but they’re mildly amusing at best, and again play like padding. The main plot is utterly ridiculous, and at times inconsistent: the monsters can’t seem to decide whether they’re teammates or adversaries. This lack of coherence isn’t a bug so much as a feature, but I wanted to see wackier characters enacting this stupidity—more like the mystical video game maven who blindfolds himself to awaken his “fifth personality” (and to set record high scores) would have been welcome.
The lightly comic plot is the starchy rice to complement the main dish—the amphibious kaiju and their awkward attempts to wreak havoc. Kawasaki goes back to basics: guys in rubber suits plodding around on miniature sets, trying to wave their heavy unarticulated limbs in as a much of a semblance of unwieldy menace as humanly (monsterly?) possible. Anatomical accuracy is not a concern: the lobster-red octopus not only has very human-looking eyes, but also a nose, and crab pincers. These giant sea creatures are all surprisingly bipedal, to boot. But like the rest of the movie, the battles are cheap. The monsters perform behind a Lego skyline, while PAs sitting just offscreen toss handfuls of Styrofoam rubble into the frame. The budget apparently didn’t allow them to actually destroy those Lego buildings, so Tokyo is not actually stomped here; no scale models were damaged, and could be returned to the hobby store after usage for a full refund. The producers couldn’t afford to risk ripping holes in those rubber suits, either; when tentacles are lopped off, it happens offscreen, then we see the giant piece of newly-cut sushi sailing through the air in a separate shot. There’s also some cheesy CGI to further season the spectacle. In other words, Big Man Japan this is not, although Monster Seafood Wars revels in its own recipe for Japanese corn. Although the costumes are goofy parodies of classic kaiju, the sound effects are quite authentic to the 1960s monster movie era Seafood is spoofing; the synthesizer shrieks and echo-chamber collisions might have been lifted from a vintage Gamera film. And the final showdown is fun, bringing in an appropriate new giant to do battle with the seafood trio.
If silly monster battles are your thing, Monster Seafood Wars will satisfy you well enough. But it seems like the kind of ground others have trod before, and I’m confident that Minoru Kawasaki is still capable of more imaginative moviemaking than this.
Kawasaki based Monster Seafood Wars on an unproduced screenplay by Eiji Tsuburaya about a giant octopus eventually defeated by a vinegar gun. If it had gone into production, that unmade project would have pre-dated Godzilla.