Stories of mass walkouts from Sundance screenings are a dime a dozen these days, but they are any counter-cultural creative’s calling card. And if shock is currency, then producing prodigy Steven Ellison (aka Flying Lotus) is gunning to be Scrooge McDuck, diving headlong, gleefully, into a bottomless pit of obscenity with his debut feature Kuso.

The title is the Japanese word for “shit”; or, at least, that’s where the term started. Spreading to Taiwan in the early 2000s, it quickly became East-Asian slang for all things internet – high camp, parody and non-sequitur. And it could not be better fitted to this profoundly malignant film: the bastard child of a thousand memes, and a seething, writhing mass of scatology, semen and slime.

Let’s try and wring a coherent narrative out of this one. In the wake of a catastrophic earthquake, the few surviving residents of Los Angeles are infected by a plague of boils. In four distinct stories, these diseased mutants experience the depths of depravity as they navigate a new world of horrors.

Two quotes spring to mind when trying to rationalise the experience of Kuso. The first is from Philip Ridley’s surrealist nightmare play The Pitchfork Disney. “It’s survival of the sickest,” says Cosmo Disney, a dazzling enfant terrible who makes a living eating live cockroaches for bewildered audiences. Given he espouses the values of “our daily dose of disgust”, he’d be quite at home in the world of Kuso.

The second is from Deadpool: “You look like an avocado had sex with an older, more disgusting avocado. Not gently; like, it was hatefucking. There was something wrong with the relationship and that was the only catharsis they could find without violence.”

If hatefucking led to the creation of Kuso, the participants may have been the respective founders of Dadaism and Funnyjunk. Directing under the moniker “steve”, Ellison collaborated with digital sicko David Firth (best known as the father of Salad Fingers) to birth this 90-minute monstrosity, a film that would have John Waters reaching for a bucket. His creation is firmly embedded in the deep web, where humour and horror mesh together in abhorrent trysts.

It’s little wonder that the credits reference transgressive champions like Eric Andre and Elijah Wood, or that Tim Heidecker makes an appearance (as a naked rapist, no less). But steve’s creation also bears the marks of David Cronenberg, William S. Burroughs, Tetsuo: Iron Man, Aphex Twin, Peter Jackson and David Lynch, even going so far as to directly visually reference Twin Peaks’ Black Lodge. It is pastiche writ large, snipped from newspapers and cemented with pus.

It’s also possible that steve would detest the listing of his sources – “To be compared is to be impaired,” Busdriver repeats adamantly in the film’s closing poem, itself concealed behind the credits.

So yeah, it’s gross. Very, very gross. But beneath the panoply of fart sounds and squishy effluvia, there’s something of value. And to parse it – to get even a shred of meaning from it – you have to dive deep into the muck.

Futility Reigns

A brother and sister engage in erotic asphyxiation, while the sister hides a sickening secret. A little person is fed disgusting soups by his mother, ridiculed by his Devo-dressed classmates for his uncontrollable bowel, and led to a forest where he feeds his faeces to a rectum-like egg creature. A woman buried underground tries to find and eat her baby, carving away at the concrete between them with her teeth. And another woman hides her pregnancy from both her multi-dimensional housemates and her date-raping stalker, later meeting a rapper terrified of breasts who seeks the medical attention of a ‘doctor’ with a giant insect in his anus.

So there’s that.

“I think it’s exploitative and sexist, though artful,” says Kazo, a furry rainbow muppet with a TV for a face voiced by Hannibal Buress, his eyes trained on a video of genital mutilation. Qualitative statements aside, it’s hard to argue with the film’s self-assessment. It’s an aesthetic wonderland, perturbing as it is; the highest quality trash around. The combined powers of Firth and steve have magnetically drawn in visual masters, and the CG sequences of throbbing genitals, manatees covered in human breasts and malformed limbs are as hypnotic as they are disquieting.

It’s hard not to focus on the depravity of it all – the sickly fluoro Adult Swim aesthetic, the wounds and orifices, the autocannibalism, insects, incest, remotes hidden in vaginas, the bleeding dicks, the ceaseless torrents of vomit and cum and poo. But beneath the giggling puerility of Kuso is something else – a rage so fierce it vibrates and shakes all above it, like the inciting earthquake.

Transgressive humour makes the repulsion more palatable.

In one passing vignette, a game-show contestant is offered a choice between resuscitating a dead, filthy child or drinking a jug of spit. Ellison offers us a rare moment of respite by cutting to static, but the choice speaks for itself – anyone who’s performed CPR could tell you the two acts are synonymous. Saving the child involves acknowledging that the corporeal world is filth, and you have to suck it up to survive.

Transgressive humour makes the repulsion more palatable. Rape, abortion and rampant misogyny play their part, and at its worst, Kuso falls back on a lamentable trope of the disabled as a source of disgust. But there’s twisted gags aplenty, like the Cosmo-esque salesman who demands of a potential client, “You ever beat a n***a with a n***a? I mean, pick his best friend up and use his ass as a battering ram?”

There’s no such thing as bad press for counter-culture.

The language is another key – in an enlightening interview with The Guardian, Ellison declared, “You have just never seen black characters like this in film – ever. Ever!” (It’s true: name one other film in which a person of colour is fellated by a talking neck boil. I’ll wait.) This level of transgression, arriving in this historical context, from this artist, cannot avoid being political. And if Busdriver’s impassioned cries of “futility reigns” don’t sell the message, the conversation that B (Bethany Schmitt, credited as The Buttress), Kazo and Masu (Donnell Rawlings) have around the glowing snuff film on their TV set must:

“I fucking hate this movie.”
“Eat ass, n***a, this is art.”
“This is garbage. Art is garbage.”

And as for those walkouts at Sundance, it’s worth nothing that even though FlyLo has talked down the more elaborate reports of the screening, there’s no such thing as bad press for counter-culture.

Cosmo Disney puts it best: “Tell someone there’s a photograph of a car crash in the newspaper and what’s the first thing they do? Buy the fucking newspaper.”

Kuso plays at the Sydney Underground Film Festival on Sunday September 17. For more information, head here.

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