This is officially the grossest movie at Sundance (and probably all of existence)
Warning: This post contains graphic descriptions. If you get queasy easily, turn back now!
Last year, deserted island dark comedy Swiss Army Man won the title of grossest film at the Sundance Film Festival but it appears that the title was short lived. A film at this year’s festival has not only won the title of grossest film of the year but it may be the grossest film at the festival EVER.
Kuso, which premiered at midnight at the Park City, Utah, festival saw many walkouts during the first ten minutes of the film. While the film takes place after a deadly earthquake in Los Angeles, many audience members were too distracted by the bizarre gore of the film to follow along with the plot.
The Verge reporter Chris Plante, who attended the screening, noted that while there were a number of walkouts early in the screening, the walkouts continued to the final scene as the movie continued to test the limits of the audience. He wrote in his review,
“A large chunk of the audience left my screening early, when a boil-covered woman choked a man with a strap until he covered half her face with semen that looked like a muted version of Nickelodeon slime. But the walk-outs continued in a consistent stream up to the final scene. Some gross-out films are one-note, but Kuso finds new ways to test viewers’ fortitude. Some folks stuck around after a woman chewed on concrete until her teeth disintegrated, but still peaced out when an alien creature force-yanked a fetus from another woman’s womb (accompanied by a Mortal Kombat sound clip: ‘Get over here!’), then smoked the tiny corpse.
Kuso director Steven Ellison, a DJ who goes by Flying Lotus, defended the film and the walkouts on Twitter, calling the number of people leaving the screening exaggerated. false
While Ellison may have warned viewers about the grossness of the film, it seems that critics weren’t a fan of the gorefest. Variety’s Peter Debruge, who attended the screening, said, of the film:
“[it was] so off-putting and/or upsetting you wish you could take your eyeballs out and scrub the experience from memory.
Yikes! While the film, starring Anders Holm, George Clinton, Hannibal Buress, and Tim Heidecker, has yet to be sold to any major studios, it’ll definitely be interesting to see if this film makes it to theaters.
