There are a number of reasons I’m hesitant to recommend Kuso, the first film from artist and musician Steven Ellison, aka Flying Lotus. (Spoilers and grotesquely explicit descriptions ahead.) I’ll start with the footage of an erect penis being stabbed. As with most footage of an erect penis being violently gored by a long steel rod, it’s certainly unexpected. So by the time you cover your eyes, it’s already too late. And if you happened to blink, it’s cool, Kuso delivers a callback.
To paraphrase the official plot synopsis, Kuso is a collection of semi-connected short films chronicling the lives of the mutated women, men, and children of Los Angeles, following the earthquake to end all earthquakes. But that’s not really Kuso’s story, let alone its point. While the film does hint at some interesting (though opaque) commentary about Los Angeles, racism, and the grim and bloody history of America, its creators are mostly interested in one thing: producing the grossest film ever.
They succeed. The sliced eyeball in Un Chien Andalou, the copious shit in River of Fundament, the corporeal mutilation of the entire torture-porn genre: it’s all an amuse-bouche for the final course that is Kuso.
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What’s it about?
Each short story has a porno-thin setup on which Kuso scaffolds its horrors. One is sort of about kink, love, and finding compatibility in sexual identities. Another is about the lengths to which a woman will go to survive. A recurring gag follows a deformed boy as he grows a disembodied head within a boulder-sized, mucous-lined orifice by basting the noggin with his own freshly produced feces. And then there’s the story of a man who’s scared of breasts, so he visits a doctor (played by George Clinton). Doc pulls down his pants and has the patient sing into his hairy, wrinkled anus in order to wake a toddler-sized cockroach. An acappella ditty does the trick. The giant insect semi-births from the doctor’s ass. The patient breaks off an antenna and drinks the creature’s frothy green blood, which renders him comatose. In his sleep, he imagines a world full of steel women, lactating like the Bellagio fountains, and a feeding behemoth newborn that barfs oil.
Okay, but what’s it really about?
It’s really easy to imagine Kuso’s creators laughing at critics trying to apply meaning where there is none. And yet the film is bookended by some genuinely thoughtful spoken-word poetry that hints at heavy, important questions of social and political turmoil. I don’t believe so many talented artists, musicians, set designers, and comedians would make this film if they didn’t want it to say something. But the copious gore, the cruel extended rape joke, the abortion sight-gags, and any number of other vomit-inducing pseudo-goofs are so distracting and disorienting that making sense of the film would require a repeat viewing. I’m not sure how many folks have the stomach for that.
Anecdotally speaking, watching fellow moviegoers leave one by one was like witnessing a real-time trigger-warning test. A large chunk of the audience left my screening early, when a boil-covered woman choked a man with a strap until he covered half her face with semen that looked like a muted version of Nickelodeon slime. But the walk-outs continued in a consistent stream up to the final scene. Some gross-out films are one-note, but Kuso finds new ways to test viewers’ fortitude. Some folks stuck around after a woman chewed on concrete until her teeth disintegrated, but still peaced out when an alien creature force-yanked a fetus from another woman’s womb (accompanied by a Mortal Kombat sound clip: “Get over here!”), then smoked the tiny corpse.
Is it any good?
As one character says while watching the footage of the penis-stabbing: “This is art. This is shit. Art is shit.” In the case of Kuso, art quite literally is shit, a diarrhetic fountain that sprays its stickiness across moments that suggest something deeper about anxiety in a world flipped upside down.
“It’s the first movie / song / book about life in the Trump era” has become trite, so I’ll say this instead: the movie is often quite literally a load of shit. But that can be comfortingly frank when it feels like the world is on fire, but we’re all just going to smile anyway.
What should it be rated?
NC-17, because a man has sex with a talking boil on a woman’s neck, and we see it in close-up to completion, and then the boil keeps talking, even though its mouth is full of semen.
How can I actually watch it?
Kuso doesn’t currently have a release date. It’s hard to imagine a mainstream studio grabbing this film, but it could be appealing to niche streaming services like Shudder. Or perhaps its creators will self-distribute the film online. The trailer, picked up by a number of music sites, has attracted tens of thousands of views.
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