By WILLIAM J. WRIGHT
Troma movies are virtually critic-proof. Approaching a half-century as cinema’s prime purveyors of surreal sleaze and absurdist exploitation, Lloyd Kaufman and company have never shied away from controversial topics or failed to find the humor in even the most untouchable social taboos. You know what to expect from TROMA: blood, beasts, bare breasts, and bad acting delivered in their patented slapdash, get-the-damned-thing-done style. More often than not, the House of Kaufman and Herz serves up all that blood, slime, and jiggle with a side of smart, pointed satire and social commentary. So approaching a review of a Troma epic requires that a writer use a different set of critical filters than usual.
That’s not to say that a critic has to lower their standards to appraise a Troma movie; as with big-budget blockbusters like Marvel and Star Wars movies, you can’t approach something like The Toxic Avenger with the same critical eye as you would Citizen Kane, Hiroshima Mon Amour, or The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Still, the average Troma Team production has more in common with those three classics in terms of ingenuity, intelligence, and heart than The Avengers or The Last Jedi. That really should come as no surprise. Lloyd Kaufman is, first and foremost, a cinephile. A Yale graduate with a taste for the work of auteurs ranging from Ernst Lubitsch to John Ford, Kaufman has melded his highbrow tastes with a decidedly lowbrow aesthetic that has made Troma the cinematic equivalent of The Ramones. Like the four leather-clad lads from Forest Hills, Queens, Troma has always hidden an incisive understanding of pop culture behind a facade of contrived “dumbness.”
For his final film, Kaufman once again turns to the works of William Shakespeare (he previously mined the Bard’s canon for 1997’s Tromeo and Juliet) with SHAKESPEARE’S SHITSTORM. A typically deranged Troma parody of The Tempest, Kaufman reimagines the play as a vehicle to take on everything from the opioid crisis to Big Pharma to so-called “woke” culture. Kaufman co-stars as Prospero, a brilliant and compassionate pharmaceutical scientist who has his life ruined by greedy capitalists, including his sister, Antoinette (also played by Kaufman in a dual role), who want to exploit his discoveries for profit, consequences be damned. An ill-fated press conference Prospero holds to salvage his career after a disastrous talk show appearance results in his wife (Catherine Corcoran) committing suicide.
Vowing revenge, Prospero flees to Tromaville, New Jersey, with his blind daughter, Miranda (Kate McGarrigle), sets up shop in an abandoned crackhouse, and hatches an elaborate plot to wreak vengeance on all who have wronged him. With help of Ariel (portrayed by Amanda Flowers in a joyfully obscene performance), a depraved wheelchair-using sex worker, and a copious dose of whale laxative, Prospero conjures up the eponymous shitstorm that brings his enemies to the shores of Tromaville. However, as Prospero sets his vengeance in motion on a night of unbridled debauchery, he doesn’t count on Miranda falling in love with Ferdinand (Erin Miller), the son of Big Al (Abraham Sparrow), the prime architect of his downfall.
SHAKESPEARE’S SHITSTORM is filled with classic Troma moments and hilariously tasteless dialogue composed in (roughly) iambic pentameter courtesy of Kaufman and co-writers Gabriel Friedman, Frazer Brown, Zac Amico, and Doug Sakmann. The special effects are as typically low-rent, unconvincing, and nauseating as ever, bolstered by some nice practical puppetry and prosthetics work culminating in an outrageous full-body suit (complete with multiple appendages and sex organs) worn by Kaufmann in the film’s climax. In a real departure for Troma, the film even contains some (gasp) relatively competent CGI. Thanks to the cinematography of Lucas Pitassi, SHAKESPEARE’S SHITSTORM may be the best-looking Troma film ever. As always, Kaufman composes his shots and directs his cast with artfulness and skill that is far in excess of what the material demands, begging the question of what might have been had the cinematic gods dealt him a different hand.
However, if the film and its director can be faulted for anything, it is its muddled and largely superficial attack on “cancel culture” and the so-called “wokeness” that permeates modern media. At the risk of sounding like the very politically correct scolds that Kaufman is aiming at, it often seems that the film is punching down at the very outsiders that Troma has always championed with insights that never rise above the level of discourse of a Fox News editorial. Sadly, Kaufman’s noble intentions and his heartfelt but hamfisted climactic plea that we celebrate our differences fall flat. There is much to lampoon when it comes to political correctness, but SHAKESPEARE’S SHITSTORM just doesn’t do so with the originality or sharpness that we’ve come to expect from Troma. Yet, Kaufman gets it right with his takedown of corporate greed, a problem he’s repeatedly faced firsthand while carving out Troma’s niche in a cinematic landscape dominated by big studios and soulless blockbusters. On the surface, it may seem that Kaufman is commenting on Big Pharma and its culpability in the opioid crisis, but there’s little doubt that he’s using those topics as a metaphor for his (and Troma’s) travails in the film industry.
Despite its missteps, SHAKESPEARE’S SHITSTORM is the ultimate Troma picture and the perfect coda to Lloyd Kaufman’s 50-plus years of truly independent filmmaking. Although he may play a twisted incarnation of The Tempest‘s deposed Prospero in the film, Kaufman remains more like cinema’s King Lear, madly howling at the storm of greed, hypocrisy, and good taste.
Lloyd Kaufman is currently touring SHAKESPEARE’S SHITSTORM with special screenings at select theaters throughout the United States
