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If I ever get to achieve some sort of Internet celebrity status in my current life-time before reincarnating into a “Sweet Transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania”, one of my goals would be to round up into one room all the most infamously renowned video-reviewers of the moment (such as Oancitizen, Phelous and JesuOtaku, to name a few), sit among them on a comfortable sofa and get them to watch a 2011’s Japanese flick by the name of “Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead.” Their frightened and painful expressions and sudden tendency to ritual disembowelment after witnessing the sheer level of unworldly grotesqueness this film has to offer, would indubitably make my own sorrow feel slightly less grating.

If the actual title didn’t already work as a (not so)fair warning of horrible things to come, the piece in question can better be described as a “proud” member of the alien tentacle/zombie exploitation sub-genre (yes, there is one), a brand of hardcore trash gory b-movie finesse that director Noburo Iguchi seems to specialize with.

 

At this point I could easily stop writing this review and tell you to avoid any physical and/or psychological contact with this particular product quite literally defecated from the dirtiest bowels of Nippon. In fact, I should be absolutely clear about the point I want to make without circling it ambiguously for too long: you don’t want to see this film. You might be inclined to seek it out of genuine curiosity or just to “enrich” your personal “things I’m never going to show to anybody” collection, but, truthfully, it’s just not worth it. This little gem will not only pulverize every perceptible ounce of your grey matter, but it will disgust you, repel you and push your mind to the edge like only the best “So Bad it’s Not Funny” movies will ever manage to be.

Let me put that statement into perspective by proposing a unique comparison with a rather heated milestone of filmmaking controversy. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Salò” (which you might know of if you studied cinema) was a fierce, unapologetic, rage-induced denunciatory outcry against modern society that chose a very peculiar Marquis de Sade-inspired allegory in order to represent said resentment. To be more specific, this magnum opus was a three hours-long 1970’s “artsy” exploitation film that depicted the symbolic figures of all the economic, political and religious powers torturing young people via mass rape, faeces-based meals and sadistic dismemberment.

Now, if said film’s level of uncomfortable horridness was not only a hundred times superior but also completely deprived of its underlying theme in favour of an insanely gratuitous form of kinky comedy that utterly fails at being remotely funny, you would basically have the heavily-censored version of “Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead.”

With that said, let us delve into it.

Our story begins with a group of stereotypical teenagers entirely comprised of an otaku with severe stomach issues, an imposing harlot that constantly acts like she owns the place, a very generic airhead, her ridiculously thug-ish boyfriend whose favourite activities are either rape or drug addiction, and the even more generic sailor-type school uniform-wearing main heroine with a tragic past - you know, otherwise we wouldn’t know this film takes place in Japan.

 

Apparently, the “princess-type” of the lot is after some sort of parasitic worm that should prevent her from gaining weight upon ingestion, therefore she has the “brilliant” idea of dragging the rest of her so-called friends to the usual cell phone-incapacitating, undisclosed location that you might have seen in any horror movie ever made. She finds the aforementioned parasite, she swallows it and later on she gets caught by exploding diarrhoea - way to go, Captain Genius.

 

It’s pretty much at the time were she exposes her fine air-expelling behind for a “sexy” close up inside a hillbilly cesspool in the middle of the forest, that this movie really starts to show its “cinematic prowess.” To be precise, a perverted zombie covered in human excrements comes out of the shithole in order to grab her dirty booty.

On that note, I really, really do hope you love fart jokes more than anything in your life, because the rest of the movie pretty much revolves entirely on gas-leaking shticks and several more “colourful” props coming out of human anuses for about two hours of total running time.

It turns out that a local psychotic scientist made a pact with a race of alien ultra-bodies in order to prolong the life of his even more psychotic (yet sickly) daughter: in exchange for hosts to possess (a la “Ganados” from “Resident Evil 4”) the worms would provide some sort of contrived death-delaying symbiosis with the little girl. Luckily for us, the improvised Sailor Senshi of the movie is on the case and she happens to know martial arts.

 

Thus, in between sporadic scenes of lesbian fan-service with the airheaded best friend, ludicrous death scenes and the customary flashback that revealed her little sister committed suicide because bullies forced her to fart (there we go), she manages to survive the alien zombie outburst and kill off the parasite queen by using her own inner gas as rocket fuel for a mid-air “Dragon Ball Z” battle to the death.

It should be also mentioned that the rest of the flick is filled with memorable scenes such as our heroes getting attacked by said ultra-bodies drilling their way out of the Ganados’ decomposing posteriors, more farting shenanigans enriched by surprisingly dull fatalities, and a girl getting raped to death by tentacles coming out of another girl’s anus…

 

This movie is confounding to say the very least, not just because of its over-the-top contents of utter repulsiveness, but also due to its tragic lack of consistency. The brain-damaging amount of juvenile humour and “old-school” misogynistic portrays of women in this type of gory bottom-of-the-barrel grindhouse production, although thoroughly unfunny, annoying and repetitive, would give this flick the somewhat idiomatic feel of a meta-linguistic parody. Sadly, the presence of multiple anal tentacle rape scenes and the suchlike, drastically turn the tides of the movie from “trying to be funny in a lazy, ineffective way” to just plain “uncomfortably cruel for no good reason.” The ideal coup de grace comes in the form of the heavily misplaced climax, where the main character and the villain go Shounen Jump on us: it might have worked well (not) if the rest of the film had the kind of self-amusing grotesque Gainax-like vibe to be contextualized with instead of regurgitating the worst bits from the more hardcore segments of the hentai genre.

In the end, director Noburo Iguchi just went on and threw whatever he wanted into his movie, thus resulting in an atrocious display of wasted talent (because he seems to be pretty good in handling montages and cheap special effects, apparently) that wants to be funny but it’s not, and wants to be sexy but it’s definitely not. This sort of mind-derailing blob can only be enjoyed by a very “dedicated” kind of audience.

I did not like it, by the way. Live-action tentacle porn just doesn’t work for me.

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My score for “Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead” is:

“Just a Flesh Wound”: That darn bad.

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Just avoid this movie. Go find “Deadball”, instead. It’s Baseball with cartoonish ultra-violence and spectacular bloody jokes.

You should be able to laugh at it.

Bye.