Review: Kuso
Los Angeles based electronic musician Flying Lotus's feature directorial debut is a god damn hectic, messy, disgusting, electrically charged true original. It dares you to look away as it shoves some of the most vile visuals I've ever seen in a feature film down your throat. That's not to say that it's not worth watching, the exact opposite in fact. The fever dream that is Kuso is a collection of difficult to watch toilet humor that somehow really fucking works.
An earthquake hits Los Angeles, turning it into a depraved hellhole full of monsters and wiping away all concepts of morality from humanity. There is no more overall plot than that, and even that little is delivered in as abstract a way as possible through a song from underground rapper Busdriver at the beginning. The entire film takes place in vignettes following a few of the denizens of this warped world. There's a woman desperately searching for her child in a cruel maze. Another woman smokes weed and hangs out in her apartment with two fuzzy transdimensional beings that killed all of her family and friends. One little boy with a gigantic boil on his face is force-fed disgusting gruel by a zealot mother who sends him off to a school wearing a dunce cap where he shits his pants and runs home crying through a beautiful wood tainted by his fart noises and a giant pod creature. These vignettes (separated by goofy animated sequences set to music from FlyLo himself) may follow their own logic and have arcs, but are little more than an excuse to showcase Kuso's gross-outs that are as hilarious as they are uncomfortable.
Flying Lotus previously collaborated with masters of gross-out humor Tim & Eric for the music video of Parisian Goldfish. It seems that this collaboration was particularly fruitful. Tim & Eric's Billion Dollar Movie was a very funny movie, but it did not feature as large an array of the duo's patented disgusting sights and uncomfortable editing. Kuso is entirely built of those things, it feels exactly like if the hardest to watch Tim & Eric sketch was stretched to 90 minutes. Effects are impressive, whether it's the largely practical special effects makeup and puppetry or the slick, involved animated bits.
Every human in Kuso is deformed in some way, ranging from absurdly grotesque to slightly less absurdly grotesque. Musicians like George Clinton and Busdriver and comedians such as Anders Holm, Hannibal Buress, and even Tim Heidecker do appear, but even these usually friendly faces are far from calming due to their horrific looks and the downright scary manner in which they act.
There is no middle ground with Kuso. You are going to either vibe with Flying Lotus's surreal vision or you are going to leave feeling personally insulted. You can almost certainly figure out which person you are by seeing any screenshot from any second of this totally bizarre experience. My only advice if you choose to take this acid trip, just be ready to know you are not ready, and maybe know where your restrooms are.
