★☆☆☆☆
Killer toilets, a dead child, and a great deal of poop: gross-out horror-comedy that mistakes lots of faeces for a screenplay.
There is, I’ll admit, something almost admirable about a film this committed to the toilet. Gurcius Gewdner and Gustavo Vinagre’s Brazilian gross-out comedy opens with a grieving mother whose child dies in a freak lavatory accident, which, if your sense of humour runs as dark as mine, is one of the funniest things at the festival. It’s completely unafraid to get faecal, and there can be a base pleasure in watching a film chase an idea this stupid with a straight face.
The problem is that “toilets are disgusting and now they also kill people” is the whole idea, and once you’ve clocked it in the first ten minutes there is nowhere left to go for the remaining however-many. What follows is dull, single-mindedly obsessed with its own effluent, and stretched miles past what the material can bear. The characters are strictly one-dimensional, drawn thinly enough that the killer plumbing has more personality than the people it’s dispatching, and I never warmed to a single one of them.
Transgression by itself isn’t a joke, it’s a starting position, and this builds nothing on top of it. I laughed once, hard, near the top, then sat there for the rest waiting for a second idea that never flushed through. Reserved for connoisseurs of the scatological and nobody else. If the phrase “killer toilet movie” makes you grin rather than sigh, add a star and dive in – but lower your standards accordingly.
Bowels of Hell played at Tubi FrightFest in London.