Gurcius Gewdner and Gustavo Vinagre’s new film Bowels of Hell is a shitty horror comedy. And that’s no bad thing. Let’s get something straight from the outset, this story of a demonic toilet is the sort of film that makes a film critic want to use all the puns at their disposal. So I’m going to have fun, because the filmmakers obviously did.
The log line (there I go) is that when a tragic incident with a lavatory led to the death of her son, party organiser Malu (Martha Nowill) has become torn with grief and literally constipated with repressed trauma. Her surviving child Genesis (Benjamín Damini) is transitioning, something Malu refuses to accept, while preparations for a gender reveal party of an obnoxious influencer (Chandelly Braz) are stressing her out. The event is set to take place in Malu’s apartment building, where a collection of oddballs live – such as an American mystic who reads turds the way other fortune tellers read palms. Meanwhile, the building’s janitor is being called on to unclog toilets as something sinister is beginning to build up in the pipes. At one point a supernatural electrical charge straight out of Ghostbusters invades the building and the psychic blockage is building.
The film has its fair share of gory deaths and indulges in a John Waters-inspired assault on good taste. And there’s more than plop jokes and gross-out horror. In fact, the tone shifts considerably from scene to scene or more often than not within the same scene. Malu’s genuine grief for her son is shown as she watches a video of them saying goodbye to their poo before they flush it away. As many of her fellow residents go to town with their over the top characters, Nowill keeps Malu grounded in an emotional reality, even as the shit hits the fan. This gives the film occasional moments of surprising subtlety.
Most jokes are universal. Who doesn’t like leather-clad cops who look like they’ve just finished rousting a fetish bar? And there are some veteran performers who seem to be enjoying themselves with the grindhouse vibe. The keen-eyed will also spot filmmaker Bruce LaBruce making a cameo.
My reservations are minor. There is a problem with pacing. After a fantastic opening, the film takes too long getting to its mad finale. Some of the jokes might get lost in translation. And there’s a cameo with an ice cream vendor which will make much more sense to a Brazilian audience than it will to an international public.
Overall, the film is an effective satire of the enshitification of modern life, the need for love and tolerance and the absolute need for a good dump once in a while. Charles Bukowski once lamented that people wrote thousands of love poems and you could go your whole life without once being in love. No one, he complained, wrote poems about number twos, but you couldn’t survive a fortnight without doing one. Bukowski made it his life mission to rectify the imbalance and here too there is a lingering sense that the filmmakers have something serious to accomplish amidst the Peter Jackson (thinking of Bad Taste, 1987 ) nuttiness and fun, but the important thing is that it’s funny and quite frankly mad.
Bowels of Hell showed at the 55th International Film Festival Rotterdam.
