Lloyd Kaufman has done one of my favorite things that any film director can do.
As he’s gotten older, he’s gotten WEIRDER. He’s not relaxing. He’s not interested in proving that he can direct a straightforward drama with Meryl Streep. He’s never let whatever state the film industry is in prevent him from making something new. He’s never apologized for anything. He’s always had a sense of humor. And, despite his reputation, he (as a director, at least) has never just pushed out crap for the quick buck. In a Kaufman-directed film there is ALWAYS subversion underneath the splatter and bodily fluids and nudity and tasteless jokes. He’s constantly taking shots at the shitheads, the bought-and-sold corporate fucks who’d happily sell you fast food burgers made of rat poison if it meant more profit and power.
The 73-year-old Kaufman also never talks shit about younger people. Yes, he’ll joke about their addictions to cellphones and social media, but that’s not exclusive to the kids. We’re ALL under that spell. Kaufman has no lecture in him to anyone about how they should live their lives, whether they’re 15 or 95.
All he has is anger toward the powers that be and a natural wit. He’s a devastatingly funny guy.
Along with Alejandro Jodorowsky and Joe Bob Briggs, I would place Lloyd Kaufman among my role models for how to age. He’s one of those guys who is teaching me how to get older and hopefully not become a boring asshole. (I’d put David Lynch in there, too, but living to his 70s with his smoking habit makes him too superhuman for me to relate to him.)
That was something that I couldn’t stop thinking about as I watched this relentless and kinetic and all-around insane film. It’s made with total freedom, which is something that Kaufman has had as an independent filmmaker from the very beginning, but this one really flips over the game board.
It’s mind-boggingly busy, paced like a rocket and has, dare I say, a French New Wave-like treatment of form and structure (or maybe a Warner Bros. Looney Tunes treatment of form and structure, come to think of it). This film deconstructs itself, but never in a pretentious way. It’s ALWAYS in the service of a laugh. Memorable moments include a scene that looks like someone accidentally turned on the director’s commentary track (complete with Blu-ray/DVD pop-up menu) to reveal Kaufman’s jokingly pompous explanation of a particularly absurd moment. There’s also the scene that pauses and cuts to Kaufman and his wife, playing themselves, as they argue in the editing room about whether or not the gag they just interrupted is going too far.
Also, one of Kaufman’s signatures is that he crams multiple jokes simultaneously in the foreground and the background and in all corners of the frame. He does that all over this film. Check out the frequent cuts to Tromaville’s morning news show where you have the dialogue between the news anchors happening while a news ticker offers more comedy at rapid fire speed at the bottom of the screen. It’s impossible to pay attention to both. You HAVE to see this twice to catch all of the jokes.
As for the story… if you can’t remember what happened in the previous movie from half-a-decade ago, don’t worry about it. This one catches you up at the beginning. Not that it’s all that complicated. You’ve got two nubile bullied teenage lesbians going to Tromaville High where the cafeteria serves chemical slop made by a local food company run by evil profiteering perverts (their factory built where the old nuclear power plant from the original Class of Nuke ‘Em High used to be). The food is turning the kids into mutants. Meanwhile, one of the lead girls gets impregnated by her pet duck, who’s also been mutated, and very quickly gives birth to a human-duck baby hybrid.
You know, that old story.
From there, Kaufman goes to the moon. I don’t even want to talk about most of the gags here because I don’t want water ’em down for you before you see ’em. All I can say is that you can expect at least a dozen gallons of blood, an equal amount of slime, a decent amount of other fluids, body parts flying all over the screen, at least ten miles of naked flesh (male and female), a witty parody of Carrie, and a disturbing parody of The Silence of the Lambs that features Kaufman himself and in which we get to know him better than ever.
This is the smartest, dumbest, craziest Troma movie, yet. Well worth the five year wait.