North American Debut
Fantasia Film Festival 2020
When considering Troma Entertainment spent 45 years of disrupting media, they are showing no signs of slowing down! Their latest, #shakespearesh*tstorm is a reimagining of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and they topped themselves! We get everything this studio is famous for–namely a car being flipped and gross out humour– that any Tromaphile will love to digest. In this case, blast out of a certain orifice!
The period tale has long since been declared proto-scifi; the most well known is The Forbidden Planet. I had to wonder how Lloyd Kaufman would adapt this for this Tromaverse, and honestly, he did a wild job in reinterpreting the many set pieces and narrative that make up the play to a crazy piece of still science fiction! He plays the mad scientist, Prospero, who invents a cure to everything and his sister Antoinette Duke (also Lloyd) helps with the marketing.
A corporation wants to buy it, but instead of offering it to the world, it’s kept under lock and key, and that’s when all shit hits the roof. Prospero is destitute and plots a comeback. In the meantime, the blind Miranda (Kate McGarrigle) falls in love with his rival’s son, Ferdinand (Erin Miller). Getting revenge won’t be easy.
Kaufmann knows Shakespeare’s material very well and you can recognize the flow from the original work transposed into a modern tale of drug cartels, mad science and forbidden romance. The later acts get raunchy and crude–typical for this studio’s works–and this is the only warning you’ll get. This mashup of a love melody makes the musical moments altogether the bits you want to rewind and sing along.
Whether this film will get adapted even further into a musical (like with Toxic Avenger) and if Lloyd will consider another Shakespeare play to TROMA-tize is light years away from planning, but I’m hopeful. I can only imagine what he can do with A Midsummer’s Night Dream and it’s very dirty.
