Rating: ★★★

The low-budget production company Troma gained fame in the 1980s with films like The Toxic Avenger (1986) and Class of Nuke ‘Em High (1986) and assorted sequels. They went on to specialise in a series of films with deliberately ridiculous titles. See a sample listing that include the likes of Fat Guy Goes Nutzoid (1986), Surf Nazis Must Die (1987), Stuff Stephanie in the Incinerator (1989), Strangest Dreams: Invasion of the Space Preachers (1990), Chopper Chicks in Zombietown (1991), Fertilize the Blaspheming Bombshell! (1992), The Killer Condom (1996) and Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (2006) to name but a selection.

#ShakespearesShitstorm is Troma’s take on William Shakespeare’s probably final play The Tempest (1610-11). The play concerns the magician Prospero who has sought exile on an island with his daughter Miranda, which is disrupted as a shipload of dignitaries comes to visit as Prospero magically conjures a storm (the titular ‘tempest’) to cause them to crash. Troma had previously ventured into conducting a bad taste variation on Shakespeare with Tromeo & Juliet (1996).

In the director’s chair, Troma head Kaufman launches into The Tempest in ways that would probably have Shakespeare rotating in his grave so fast he would be in danger of causing Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-on-Avon (Shakespeare’s burial place) to implode into a miniature black hole. Prospero (who is played by Lloyd Kaufman) has now become a pharmaceutical company executive who devised a cure to the opioid crisis but was driven out by accusations of cultural appropriation (for wearing a sombrero on Cinco de Mayo). The tempest itself involves a cruise ship of pharmaceutical executives being covered in whale shit. The spirit Ariel has become a stripper in a wheelchair who talks via an electrolarynx. Prospero’s island becomes a converted crack house in Tromaville, New Jersey, where Caliban becomes a child abandoned by a crack whore who is taken in by Prospero. We even get appearance from Shakespeare himself (Frazer Brown) who admits that the line “Oh what fools these mortals be,” was inspired by him performing sex acts on a donkey in Mexico. Miranda is now blind and has a masturbation scene while Ferdinand looks on.

The whole film revels in as much typically Troma-esque Bad Taste as can conceivably be packed into a 94 minute runtime. There are strippers, drug taking, the wheelchair-ridden Ariel performing analingus on the ship’s captain and so on. Prospero’s laboratory is filled with hybrid animals, including a cock (a chicken with an oversize penis) and what is labelled as an ‘armadildo.’ The film culminates in an orgy of sorts that involves the assembled melting down, while developing breasts, giant oversized penises and burbling green goo.

What may surprise people about Kaufman, who revels in bad taste, is that he is also has a political voice. Much of #ShakespearesShitstorm is aimed at the greed of pharmaceutical manufacturers, in particular the opioid industry. By far and away though, the bulk of Kaufman’s satire is aimed at the excesses of Woke and Cancel Culture. Prospero is driven out for cultural appropriation for wearing a sombrero and being seen as offensive during a press conference, amid lines such as “Hand gestures are a tool of patriarchal oppression” and questions like “Is masturbation cultural appropriation?”

There are a duo of social justice warriors (Zoë Geltman and Dylan Greenberg) who wander through the film. They come across a strip joint and conclude that women owning their sexualities is great before decrying it as being problematic when they realise that the audience is heterosexual men. Towards the end, the guy dies “No social justice warrior can survive perspective” and goes out with a speech “Being outraged all the time is shallow and lacks perspective.” There is a plus size social justice warrior (Zac Amico) who castigates the film as an adaptation of a Shakespeare because he is a “white CIS male,” while saying she has never read anything that wasn’t a blog or a menu, before ending up being ravaged by the cock chicken’s penis and her head blown off. Eventually, Kaufman’s Prospero re-engineers himself as ‘the ultimate in appropriation,’ appropriating all races, nationalities and genders – the body of a German, the brain of a Jew, the credit score of a Caucasian, the penis of a Black man – whereupon he is hailed by the media.

At age 75, Lloyd Kaufman is on the best form he has ever been as both director and lead actor of the film. The satire in #ShakespearesShitstorm is sharp and the most pungent he has ever allowed it to be – contrast this to the clumsiness of the war satire in Troma’s War (1988). More to the point, Kaufman plays multiple roles on screen – as Prospero as well as in drag as his sister, a rival pharmaceutical executive. The scene with Prospero presiding over the madcap orgy of meltdowns as he wreaks his ‘brutal revenge’ shows Kaufman acting with a maddened fury and glee that quite takes you aback at how much he seems to be throwing into his performance. Kaufman goes for broke at the end of the film where he appears as the ultimate appropriation in a body that contains breasts, a giant dark-skinned penis, bulging muscles, multiple skin colours and a dwarf’s arm.

Lloyd Kaufman’s other films as director are The Toxic Avenger (1984), Class of Nuke ‘Em High (1986), Troma’s War (1988), The Toxic Avenger Part II (1989), The Toxic Avenger III: The Last Temptation of Toxie (1989), Sgt. Kabukiman N.Y.P.D. (1990), Tromeo & Juliet (1996), Terror Firmer (1999), Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV (2000), Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (2006), Return to Nuke ‘Em High Volume 1 (2013) and Return to Return to Nuke ‘Em High Aka Vol. 2 (2017).

Trailer here