MUBI is a streaming service that offers a curated selection of films. Every day, the library adds one film and loses another. Each film is available for thirty days. The selected films are tremendously diverse and delightfully off the beaten track, and they come in interesting “series” bound by everything from genre to star to obscure cinematic movement. In other words, in these times of quarantine, I couldn’t resist the self-evident challenge at hand. So, I’ll be watching every MUBI movie and reviewing them here on this swanky new post.

At first, I thought I’d be opening today’s write-up with something about how Tromeo and Juliet upends nineties sensibilities as viciously as The Toxic Avenger did for seventies sensibilities. Then, I watched today’s MUBI feature, 1976’s Blood Sucking Freaks, which totally destroys that tentative timeline of independent, cult film production company Troma’s offensive evolution.

Tromeo and Juliet (Lloyd Kaufman, 1997)

Tromeo and Juliet, featured yesterday as part of MUBI’s series of restored Troma classics, provides exactly what you’d expect out of a total behavioral perversion of Shakespeare’s oft-retold romantic tragedy. Directed by legendary Troma co-founder Lloyd Kaufman, Tromeo and Juliet re-situates the dueling families of its doomed lovers amidst a cartoonish, nineties Manhattan backdrop. It is bathed in all the usual Troma excesses: pervasive sex, nudity, and riotous, practical-effects-driven gore chief among them. Kaufman and co-writer James Gunn (who now, interestingly, resides in a filmmaking space directly opposed to Troma’s independent creed) hit most of the same beats as Shakespeare’s classic play — they just hit them differently.

Watching Tromeo is bound to evoke near-constant cries of “Did that happen in Romeo and Juliet?!” Though the answer is frequently a literal “no” in terms of whatever form of gross excess resides on the screen, it’s surprisingly often “yes” in terms of the base effect. There are departures from the source material, to be sure, especially towards the film’s tail end. But all in all, Kaufman and company manage a remarkably faithful adaptation by the standards of exploitation cinema. The details have simply been exaggerated. Eyes pop, heads burst, breasts are everywhere — yes, this is a most glorious bastardization sure to evoke the fury of Shakespearean purists. It can be shockingly vile. And yet, somehow, not as vile as…

Blood Sucking Freaks (Joel M. Reed, 1976)

Blood Sucking Freaks. Troma’s 1976 release is an exercise in sheer vulgarity. This tale of a sadistic showman named Sardu, who puts on “plays” starring kidnapped, brainwashed torture subjects under the guise of performance art, is staunchly opposed to even the loosest definitions of “good taste.” Its closest comparison is with torture porn. Freaks is easily as graphic as Saw or Hostel (one guillotine trap is worthy of the former franchise), but it has something those films don’t: a tongue in its cheek, however mutilated that tongue might be. It’s also got its foot further into the “porn” camp. As a product of its time, Blood Sucking Freaks is mind-blowingly vulgar, remaining offensive to the senses even by generous modern standards.

Admittedly, writer/director Joel M. Reed injects the film with a degree of effect beyond superficial shock-value. The relationship between audience and artifice is a point of focus; viewers’ attention is understandably drawn to their own role as spectators to the on-screen sadism, driven to proclaim “They’re just actors,” just as Sardu tells the watchers of his horror show. Meanwhile, characters’ consent is so frequently assumed that it becomes a noticeable trend, though this may have been accidental rather than a purposeful thematic concern.

Although it loses the vulgarity contest, Tromeo and Juliet is the more cinematically worthy of the two films. It too sometimes goes overboard, but its purposeful excess contrasts in striking fashion with its rooting in classical literature. It evokes strong responses by bouncing between Shakespearean verse and gratuitous sex and violence, making it the more artfully provocative of the two films. Blood Sucking Freaks feels comparatively pointless, even though it is more purely shocking. The former film justifies its entertaining excess through compelling tonal contrasts, while in the latter, everything is tangential to unadulterated disgust.

— Isaac Handelman

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