Kuso
Director: Flying Lotus (aka Steven Ellison)
Writer: David Firth, Flying Lotus, Zack Fox
Cast: Hannibal Buress, George Clinton, David Firth, Tim Heidecker, Lexington Steele, Anders Holm, Bob Heslip
Part of: /slash Filmfestival
Seen on: 24.9.2017
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Plot:
After an earthquake hit Los Angeles, its inhabitants are curiously changed, but most of them have adjusted to the new ways of life now. The protagonists of the four different segments in the film are survivors after all.

The best thing about Kuso is that I fell asleep a couple of times, so I was spared some of it. Other than that the film was a simple and absolutely disgusting waste of time.

Look, I get that humor can and at times should be transgressive. Transgressive humor is there to make us consider limits and to find out whether those limits still hold true, or if we’re shutting something out that should be included in our conversations and in our jokes.

But Kuso doesn’t ask those questions. Kuso is so far beyond any limit that the matter of limits is not even an issue in the slightest. Instead it feels like they set out to make the grossest film possible simply to be gross. And of course that’s their prerogative, but I wonder why I should watch it? I don’t feel any urge to reconsider whether boils and shit and I don’t know what are actually as gross as society makes them out to be.

That means that my reaction to the film meandered between disgust and boredom – my usual reaction to fecal humor. But usually fecal humor is like one joke of many and not the main event (though, to be fair, they also included a rape joke because shit and pus wasn’t bad enough). Building an entire film on that is simply not good enough.

There were moments there that I could appreciate, particularly in the transitions between segments. And the end credits fit the film perfectly. But other than that, watching Kuso felt more like torture than anything else.

Summarizing: Unless you’re the world’s biggest fan of shit, skip it. Widely.