Saturday 4 April 2020

Let's Talk About "Zombie A**: Toilet of the Dead" (A Real Film)





                         Year: 2011
                         Directed by: Noburo Iguchi
                  



If the actual title didn’t already work as a not-so fair warning of horrible things to come, the piece in question can better be described as a “proud” member of the alien tentacle/zombie exploitation sub-genre (yes, there is one), a brand of Japanese hardcore trash gory b-movie finesse in which director Noburo Iguchi seems to specialize.

At this point I could easily stop writing this review and tell you to avoid any physical or psychological contact with this particular product quite literally defecated from the dirtiest bowels of Nippon. In fact, I should be absolutely clear about the point I want to make without circling it ambiguously for too long: you don’t want to see this film. You might be inclined to seek it out of genuine curiosity or just to “enrich” your personal “things I’m never going to show to anybody” collection but, truthfully, it’s just not worth it. This little gem will not only pulverize every perceptible ounce of your grey matter, it will disgust you, repel you and push your mind to the edge like only the best “So Bad it’s Not Good” schlock will ever manage to do. Let me put that statement into perspective by proposing a unique comparison with a rather heated milestone of filmmaking controversy. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “120 Days of Sodom” (which you might know if you studied cinema) was a fierce, unapologetic, rage-induced denunciatory outcry against modern society that chose a very peculiar Marquise DeSade-inspired allegory in order to represent said resentment. To be more specific, this magnum opus was a three hours-long 1970’s “artsy” exploitation film that depicted the symbolic figures of all the economic, political and religious powers torturing young people via mass rape, faeces-based meals and sadistic dismemberment.
Now, if said film’s level of uncomfortable horridness was not only a hundred times heightened but also completely deprived of its underlying theme in favour of an insanely gratuitous form of kinky comedy that utterly fails at being even remotely funny, you would basically have the heavily-censored version of “Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead.”
With all of that said, let us delve into it.

Our story begins with a group of stereotypical teenagers entirely comprised of an otaku with severe stomach issues, an imposing harlot that constantly acts like she owns the place, a very generic airhead, her ridiculously thug-ish boyfriend whose favourite activities are either molestation or drug addiction, and the even more generic sailor-type school uniform-wearing main heroine with a tragic past (as it happens). Apparently, the “princess-type” of the lot is after some sort of parasitic worm that should prevent her from gaining weight upon ingestion therefore she has the “brilliant” idea of dragging the rest of her so-called friends to the usual cell phone-incapacitating, undisclosed location that you might have seen in any horror movie ever made. She finds the aforementioned parasite, she swallows it and later on she gets a case of exploding diarrhoea - way to go, Captain Genius! It’s pretty much at the time were she exposes her fine air-expelling bottom for a “sexy” close up inside a ye olde cesspool in the middle of the forest that this flick really starts to show its “cinematic prowess.” To be precise, a perverted zombie covered in human excrements comes out of the shitehole in order to grab her dirty booty.
On that note, I really, really hope you love fart jokes more than anything in your life because the rest of the film pretty much revolves entirely on gas-leaking shticks and several more unsavoury props coming out of human anuses for about two hours of total running time.
It turns out that a local psychotic scientist made a pact with a race of alien ultra-bodies in order to prolong the life of his even more psychotic yet sickly daughter: in exchange for hosts to possess (a la Ganados from “Resident Evil 4”) the worms would provide some sort of contrived death-delaying symbiosis with the little girl. Luckily for us, the improvised Sailor Senshi of the movie is on the case and she happens to know martial arts. Thus, in between sporadic scenes of lesbian fan-service with the airheaded best friend, ludicrous death scenes and the customary flashback that revealed her younger sister committed suicide because bullies forced her to fart (there we go), she manages to survive the alien zombie outburst and kill off the parasite queen by using her own inner gas as rocket fuel for a mid-air “Dragon Ball Z” battle to the death. This is a real film.
It should be also mentioned that the rest of this tripe is filled with memorable scenes such as our heroes getting attacked by the ultra-bodies in the shape of drills out of the Ganados’ decomposing posteriors, more farting shenanigans enriched by surprisingly dull fatalities and a girl getting sexually assaulted to death by tentacles coming out of another girl’s anus.

This movie is confounding to say the very least, not just because of its over-the-top contents of utter repulsiveness, but also due to its tragic lack of consistency. The brain damaging amount of juvenile humour and “old-school” misogynistic portrayals of women in this type of gory bottom-of-the-barrel grindhouse production would give this flick the somewhat idiomatic feel of a meta-linguistic parody - a very unfunny, repetitive version thereof. Sadly, the presence of multiple anal tentacle rape scenes and the suchlike drastically turn the tides of the movie from “trying to be funny in a lazy, ineffective way” to just plain “uncomfortably cruel for no good reason” vibes. The ideal coup de grace comes in the form of the heavily misplaced climax where the main character and the villain go completely Shounen Jump on each other: it might have worked well (but not really) if the rest of the film had more creativity and variety in its awfulness instead of regurgitating most of its ideas from the hentai genre along with an overabundance of farts. In the end, director Noburo Iguchi just went on and threw whatever he wanted into his terrible film and it became old quite fast. It's an atrocious display of wasted talent (because he seems to be pretty good in handling montages and cheap special effects, apparently) that wants to be funny but it’s not, and wants to be sexy but it’s definitely not. This sort of mind-derailing blob can only be enjoyed by a very “dedicated” kind of audience.
I did not like it, by the way. Live-action tentacle porn just doesn’t work for me. Please, don't take this out of context. 

While I would urge any of you to avoid this film like wild fire, I wish to still recommend a couple of other offerings from director Noburo Iguchi's fascinarìting filmography: "Dead Sushi" (2012) is literally about undead sushi coming back to life and eating people; "Gothic Lolita Battle Bear" (2013) is exactly what it sounds like and no other description is required. Unlike "Zombie Ass", both of these entries succeeded in being pure, unapologetically trash, low-brow schlocks that are having fun along with the audience rather than at its expense. They aren't good by any stretch of the imagination but they are legitimately creative and just the right amount of honest. Speaking of honesty, I'm never writing about any of this again. Goodnight, everybody.



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