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.
Genius at work...
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.
Xenophobia +999
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.
Epic Fail
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.
Insert "Master of Martial Hearts" joke here
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…
I cannot show you... sorry, it's for your own good
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.
-
My score for “Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead” is:
“Just a Flesh Wound”: That darn bad.
-
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.
