Kuso (2017)

Director: Flying Lotus.
Starring. David Firth, George Clinton, USA. 1h 45m.

I have to be totally honest when I say that I really don’t know how to describe or classify this movie, which makes it way more interesting for me I’ve watched it twice know and while I’m morbidly obsessed with it, there’s so much I can’t deal with while watching it.

If I had known that the movie was made by Flying Lotus with David Firth as back up I could have been properly prepared, but I chanced upon this by total accident. The film has a loose wrap around plot to which 5 stories are attached, split up into small segments and clouded with experts only suitable for a deranged subculture on the edge.

If you’re familiar with David Firth’s work you’ll have some clue as to what to expect, if not, then check out his “amazing” work here www.fat-pie.com . The master of the questionable entertainment in the form of animated shorts including the Salad Fingers series managed to team up with Flying Lotus, who does a similar thing on the other side of the pond, the pair of them combine their mighty forces for Kuso, a film which follows survivors from a strange earthquake. Yep it’s that simple… sounds easy to digest right?

Personally I found it incredibly hard to digest anything while watching the movie, the open scene is a group of maggots forming the work Kuso which scrambles into a news broadcast, quickly taken over by Busdriver, a spoken word artist who sings us through the troubles of the earthquake and its aftermath, it’s soon apparent that things aren’t normal, most of the inhabitants have gross lesions all over their bodies, with different degrees of puss, boils and burn marks. Don’t worry this is the tame part, the movie gets going from there on, some will argue that it’s aim is JUST to gross out it’s viewers and while I can see that being a point I believe it’s just a method of their style to tell a story.

The stories are basic but imaginatively presented, between the romance in the story of Royal, where Missy and Kenneth struggle to align their sexual needs through strangulation and a range of diverse grotty acts, until Royal appears and shakes things up but does the vile accomplice have the answers to their problem? Mr Quiggle seems to have the answer to a lot of problems, his methods are a little unorthodox but he lives within Dr Clinton (George Clinton) and attempts to help a man cure his fear of breasts as well as helping up and coming rapper B with her pregnancy problem with an old school tool, B lives with two interdimensional creatures Kazo and Mazu and has to put up with a stalker who pops out of her toilet to talk about fucking her like a dead dog.

This is the tip of the iceberg and without full details of the grime and grit, it’s like a Technicolor nightmare and the basement play area of Tom Six all in one, very hard to pinpoint what makes it so different or wrong because nothing is quite right. Despite the high strangeness of this “dimension” it’s easy to see the very real problems which could affect “real people” in the real world, couples don’t always see eye to eye and intimacy can be a problem, hopefully Royal won’t be your cure?! In other stories about a young school boy who’s oppressed by his religious mother and teased at school, well that’s a no brainer, it happens all the time but the cure doesn’t involve smearing shit on a tongue of an unknown creature in the woods… or maybe it will get your hiking boots on my friends..

I’m certainly going to be recommending Mr Quiggles remedies for everyone from now on.. oh you lucky lovelies!

Rating 8/10

R – I dare you to name a movie quite like it!! I double dare you motherfuckers!!
L – Disturbing Top 50, Gross for Gross Sake, Totally Experimental,

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