In the aftermath of an earthquake, strange, disgusting and mostly unrelated events occur.
To explain Kuso’s plot is fairly pointless, to be honest. It doesn’t have one. It’s just a bloated bag of vignettes, where boil covered people live in a grubby dystopia. It’s the outpouring of a mind intent on trying to disgust you. An extreme of consciousness. But instead of finding something to say about human nature or society, it instead is happy to flop along like a turd slowly rolling down a hill, soiling everything it comes in to contact with.
It gained a reputation at Sundance festival as apparently lots of people walked out because of its ‘extreme’ content, but we’re inclined to think it was more down to a matter of quality than revulsion. You can probably make up your mind whether you’re going to enjoy the film or not in the first ten minutes. It’s the kind of thing that you would stumble upon at 2am on channel four in the nineties, with the sound effects to go with it. The type of film that would have given Mary Whitehouse an aneurism in the early 1980’s.
It could be fun, like an Adult Swim show spun out to feature length, if only Flying Lotus could write a joke, or had the wit and imagination for surreal humour that the Adult Swim team obviously possess. It’s a shame and a bit strange because co-writer David Firth, famous for his weird internet animations Salad Fingers and Burnt Face Man, has made some hilarious, disturbing and brilliant short animations. Kuso feels like it’s in the same vein of weirdness but without the quality. Hopefully Firth finds his place again and goes back to what made his work so great.
Maybe it’s the kind of thing you’d find funny if you were eleven. The poo jokes, the swearing, the general weirdness, attempted grotesquery and its infantile nature. Maybe it’s trying to be boundary pushing. It’s pretty up front about sex, despite having nothing worthwhile to say about it, but it barely even pushes the boundaries of bad taste.
Is it destined for cult status? This writer doubts it. It will probably just disappear off in to the ether like so many films that are released every year.
Despite its love of toilet humour, and attempts to be disgusting and oh-so edgy, Kuso is nothing but a humourless and tiresome trudge, destined to be watched only by young teenagers with poor taste in films.
KUSO / CERT: TBC / DIRECTOR: FLYING LOTUS (STEVON ELLISON) / SCREENPLAY: STEVEN ELLISON, DAVID FIRTH, ZACK FOX / STARRING: IESHA COSTON, ANDERS HOLM, TIM HEIDECKER, ZACK FOX, BETHANY SCHMITT, SHANE CARPENTER / RELEASE DATE: UK RELEASE TBA
