Kuso

"Kuso," a trippy collection of surreal comedy sketches, feels like a variety show from another planet. It's a noisy, lumpy collection of gross stuff that is vaguely thematically related, but only by stream-of-conscious logic. This presents a problem: how seriously should we take such a puzzling, fitfully fascinating collection of barely developed ideas, many of which center on bodily fluids, human waste, and rotting body parts? Written, scored and directed by formidable hip-hop artist Flying Lotus (AKA: Steve Ellison), "Kuso" is too proudly low-brow to be art gallery material. But you can see a level of consideration and personality here that sometimes puts this film leagues ahead of anything that's being done by contemporary post-dada pop surrealists like Tim Heidecker, Eric Wareheim, Eric Andre, and many other stoner-friendly comedians who regularly crank out bizarro outsider art for Cartoon Network's late-night Adult Swim off-shoot. "Kuso" may often feel unproductively loud, and monotonous, but it is a head-scratcher worth contending with.

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.