Produced over the course of two-and-a-half years, "Kuso" is a roiling stew of Flying Lotus's creative influences, some of whom have cameos in the film, like Heidecker and Funkadelic/Parliament co-founder George Clinton. All the events you see are somehow precipitated by a catastrophic Los Angeles earthquake. Beyond that, the only thing holding these scenes together are Ellison's recurring fixations with scab-and-pustule-encrusted nebbishes, and insects that emerge from rectal orifices. Watching "Kuso" consequently feels like an excavation of the many subterranean chambers of Ellison's anally-fixated imagination.
A bald child with facial deformities eats and prays with his grotesque mother, then ventures into the woods and rubs his own waste on the mysterious creature that inhabits a mossy knoll that looks like a gaping anus. Click. A Japanese woman tumbles down a hole, and discovers herself in a hellish underworld where her legs are somehow attached to a stranger's limbs. Click. A marijuana-addled woman puzzles over news that she's pregnant and fends off advances from two inter-dimensional alien roommates who look like sentient shag carpets. Click. A red computer-generated steam of what looks like bloody diarrhea hangs and undulates in the air. Click. Paper cut-outs and computer-generated images of Hieronymous-Bosch-like hellscapes are nested within human heads trapped in eyeballs trapped in skulls trapped in mouths. Click. A musician, played by Ellison, tries to banish his irrational fear of mammaries by having Clinton, playing a holistic doctor named Dr. Clinton, have a bug that lives inside Clinton's posterior spray him with psychedelic excrement. Cl--
Wait, what was that last one?
Your brain struggles to make connections between these segments because each subplot is broken down into three -to five episodes each, cut up, and spread out over the course of the film. But the diced-up juxtaposition of these segments necessarily prevents them from gelling together, so they never cohere into a bigger picture. I can commend Ellison for singular set pieces, like the film's inspired opening musical number, or a weirdly intimate early sex scene. I could also lament dismal gags, like anything involving Heidecker, a blow-up doll, and aliens.
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