KUSO – I didn’t think anything else on Shudder was capable of out-madding ‘Mad God’, or outgrossing ‘The Sadness’ for that matter, but I was wrong on both counts. Flying Lotus’s ‘Kuso’ is a scatological kaleidoscope that’s both completely nuts and only partly describable. It’s basically a series of sketches set in a sub- Lynch / Burroughs netherworld where an earthquake has made a load of weird stuff happen and everyone has boils on their faces. It made me think of Chris Morris’s ‘Jam’ reconfigured by Hieronymus Bosch after being force-fed some awful mind-bending substance that takes its user to the depths of delirium whilst leaving them with the potty-fixation of a backward teen; or to put it another way, I haven’t seen many movies that culminate in an xxx scene of someone f*cking a talking abscess that sounds a bit like Frank Sidebottom. Jimmy Screamerclauz did some of the frequent animated sequences, so if you know his stuff you’ll have an inkling of what to expect. Breathtakingly bizarre and crying out for a blu ray. With George Clinton!
FRIED BARRY – This bad taste sci-fi ‘social satire’ is about an alien-abducted junkie used as a vessel by a disembodied intelligence; he gets ‘assimilated’ or whatever in a close encounter sequence with trippy lighting and a bad rubber monster. Then it’s back on the streets of Johannesburg’s concrete wilderness, where ‘alien’ Barry rescues some children from a chainsaw wielding maniac, contributes to a psych ward uprising, and uses his spooky ET abilities to make someone pregnant and give birth to a replica Barry in under two minutes… we basically follow him from one wacked out vignette to the next, and it works in a shaggy dog way a) because it’s ludicrous and b) because of Barry, a silent, perplexed weirdo afflicted with massive gauntness (played by Gary Green, who puts in a pretty good stab at physical comedy). I was expecting something a bit more ‘Greasy Strangler’, but it’s less skanky and somehow has a bit of heart. Frankly, after ‘Kuso’ it was a bit like ‘Songs Of Praise’!
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