NEW YORK TIMES Review: The Director Lloyd Kaufman Returns With a Shakespeare Spoof
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Should you be among those lamenting the lack of whale feces and exploding genitalia coming to a theater near you, not to worry: Troma Entertainment hears your pain. And with “#ShakespearesShitstorm” — billed, I kid you not, as a musical adaptation of “The Tempest” — the durable director Lloyd Kaufman lobs multiple notions at the screen to see what sticks. In a movie held together with this many slimy fluids, pretty much everything does.
A good-natured dig at addiction, Big Pharma and the judgmentalism of liberal elites, the movie follows the efforts of a wronged scientist (Kaufman) to exact revenge on the sleazy head of an avaricious drug company (Abraham Sparrow). A lucid plot, though, is surplus to requirements as we’re dragged into a debauched shipboard party (cue the flatulent whales) and an interminable crack house orgy, while Kaufman and company gleefully lampoon social-media warriors and cultural appropriation. Wiggling women and tumescent men bump up against a revolting spoof of the elevator scene from “The Shining” (1980), and an animated sequence from the talented Josh Stifter briefly raises the tone. Excrement and other forms of ejaculate spurt continuously, suggesting that this bona fide abomination was even more disgusting to act in than to watch.
It’s all quite insane, if par for the course for Troma, which has been churning out these low-budget curios for close to 50 years now. As sitcoms are to TV and Pink Floyd is to vinyl, Kaufman’s film feels made for a more nostalgic medium and a more substance-enhanced viewing experience. Its makers, however, deserve praise simply for living up to that doozy of a title.
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