The Taint
Director: Drew Bolduc, Dan Nelson
Writer: Drew Bolduc
Cast: Drew Bolduc, Colleen Walsh, Cody Crenshaw, Kenneth Hall
Part of: /slash Filmfestival

Plot:
After a botched scientific experiment, the world’s water supplies are tainted: Any man who drinks it turns into a raging misogynist with a permanent hard-on jutting out of his pants and goes out to kill any woman that crosses his path. In the middle of this chaos is Phil (Drew Bolduc) who has managed to not get infected himself. He meets Misandra (Colleen Walsh) who is fighting against the misogynists and they throw their lots together when they cross paths with Ludas (Kenneth Hall) who tells them how The Taint came to be.

The Taint is a weird film. I’m also having a rather hard time making heads or tails of it. In any case, it’s an interesting look at a feminist topic that doesn’t really concern itself with feminist theory or actually being feminist. And it is entertaining.

[Fair Warning: This review is longer than my usual reviews and maybe overthinking it a little, but I promised die andere lena a closer look at what I think about it.]

In an interview Drew Bolduc stated

The sexuality in horror films is really fascinating. I wanted to take the sexual violence that’s usually a subconscious thing in horror and literalize it all with the cocks. American films tend to separate sex from the sex act and replacing it violence. The cocks are a joke about film itself, but they are also funny because penises are funny and offensive to people, which has a lot to do with sexual repression. I also wanted the movie to be stupid and funny.

While I agree that American films do have a weird relationship with sex and the combination of sex and violence is even stranger and Drew Bolduc did manage to his original mission with the literalization, I don’t think that just pointing that out really is enough. To use an inappropriate simile to make my point: It’s like seeing somebody kick a puppy and instead of doing something about the puppy kicking, you just point out to everyone who walks past, “look, a puppy is getting kicked. So that’s happening. It’s weird and kinda bad, let me re-enact that with a lot of hyperbole and gore.”

Of course not every film has to deliver a political message and not every movie with a political message has to have a solution handy, but somehow in this case, it wasn’t enough for me.

Maybe I’m the wrong person to judge: I’m not American and I don’t think that penises are funny per se, so I guess I’m not the target audience anyway. Nevertheless, I think that The Taint is flawed when it comes to achieving its (feminist?) goal: despite the bad guys being called misogynists, it never manages to actually be feminist since it refuses to ever leave the male perspective and the only time a woman actually makes a stand and delivers an empowering speech, she is killed by getting a dicked rammed through her head. That’s not really encouraging.

But even a flawed movie that at least tries to achieve interesting stuff, can be a good thing and The Taint is definitely one of those movies. It makes you think and at the same time, it’s funny and entertaining and more than a little disgusting. I swear, within the first five minutes of the film they’ve gone through every bodily fluid, at least half of which I could have done without.

But there were wonderful moments that really had me in stitches (the sunglasses for example, or the absolutely evil bunny animation, or Drew Bolduc’s non-performance). And I guess that every movie that makes me think as hard as this one and entertains me at the same time is a win in the end.

Summarising: falls along the lines of “glorious mess” but is definitely worth checking out.