Just when you think they can’t do anything new with the zombie genre. Along comes Japan…
What They Say:
Talented young martial artist Megumi wrestles with the guilt of her bullied sister’s suicide while joining her friends on a journey deep into the woods. There they encounter the nefarious Dr. Tanaka, who conducts gruesome experiments on the living dead. Later, as Dr. Tanaka attempts to make Megumi and friends his latest test subjects, the desperate young woman uses the dual power of karate and flatulence in order to defeat her demented captor.
The Review:
Whenever I see that Noboru Iguchi is involved in a film, especially as director, I find myself cringing a bit but stupidly intrigued to see what he’s going to do next. The last one of his that I saw was Robogeisha and that pretty much left me feeling like I was all over the map with what it wanted to do. So when Zombie Ass – Toilet of the Dead landed in my hands, I was really curious to see what he’d end up doing but also just plain scared because it makes it clear that it’s going to be all about the ass here. And Iguchi doesn’t disappoint when it comes to that as we get a lot of it here in some pretty disturbing ways. There’s plenty of areas where it’s comical as well of course, but there’s also just enough that makes you wince and cringe with how it unfolds.
The premise of the film is straightforward enough as we get to follow a group of friends that have headed out to the countryside as one of them, Maki, wants to find some particular kinds of tapeworms that she can ingest in order to lose weight and become even more appealing and get more modeling jobs. Her boyfriend and others are along for the ride, which includes high school student Megumi. Megumi has her own issues with bugs as we see in flashbacks when it comes to her sister that was tormented in school, which went so far that her sister committed suicide so that Megumi wouldn’t be drawn into it more It gets touched on a few times as the film progresses to try and give her a little more character weight, but it ends up feeling like a needless plot point more than anything else and just paints high school once again as a true hive of scum and villainy.
Unfortunately for Maki, the tapeworm doesn’t sit too well with her after awhile and it comes at a time when the group is accosted in the woods by a strange dead-like man who bites off the finger of the sole guy int he group, Tak, and it ends up sending them running into a seemingly abandoned village. This is where everything just goes crazy as it progresses, first with Maki using the old style outdoor toilet to try and ease her suffering, and then with the “shit-men” that seem to climb out of the bowels of the toilet to infect her. It’s a disturbing sequence as that progresses, filled with plenty of lower body backside nudity, because what we discover is that the villagers have been infected with something like a massive tapeworm that’s probably a good six feet long and several inches thick. And they like to expose themselves by coming out of people’s anus’ with a twisty-spinny brown colored fury. And from there they leap to other people and infect them, though at least they have the decency to go through their mouths and not their backsides.
There’s a few characters along the way that get involved, with a scientist that lives in the village who came there recently and a daughter of his who has an illness he’s helping her with, and the body count grows as the small group is further exposed to what’s going on and start to learn some of the truths of it. As you can guess from the basic design of the show though, it’s going to be all about Megumi as she’s the one with the skills and survival instincts to to make it through it, but not without some challenges and really close calls. It goes comically violent as it progresses with her martial arts skills, but also with how it gets to the big boss towards the end with a human/insect hybrid queen type that’s just weird and twisted.
What sets this show apart from other zombie style fare is the fact that it goes for such guttural approaches, which is pretty much expected from Iguchi. We get a lengthy and grimace inducing sequence with Maki trying to defecate out the tapeworm and there’s a lot of scenes with the creature that hollows out people popping out of anus’, which at times get into a spinning mode. There’s plenty of blood and poop flying as well, though at least the poop is all liquidy so it’s not like it splatters in the same way. And that is something you get to be thankful about as it goes on. When we get to the hybrid creature at the end, and the gimmick with the scientists’ daughter as well, it just gets even creepier and weirder as the combination of cheap rubber suits and mediocre at best special effects tries to make it work. But it just turns comically bad on top of bad and disgusting, which left me cringing and checking the countdown timer more than I have in quite some time.
In Summary:
Zombie-Ass: Toilet of the Dead is pretty much what you’d expect as it goes for a foul looking, ass approach. It takes a standard plot concept and just throws us into a show where instead of the creatures inside the people popping out of stomachs, they burst out of heads and asses on a regular basis as they use people as little more than puppets for their furthered egg laying and survival. The feature works with a pretty basic cast along with some subplot material that doesn’t add much to it. The cast is paper thin, the effects are pretty much low grade and it just gets sillier the further it goes on, but with plenty of disturbing moments along the way because of the poop, the way the backsides are dealt with and more. Zombie-Ass pretty much delivers on what it promises and I can see it being a hilarious kind of party movie to watch with the right crowd, but it definitely didn’t work for me.
Grade: D
