Shortly after the second screening of “Fuck My Son!” at the Toronto Film Festival where surely the random assignment of the IMAX screen at the Scotiabank made for some kind of Guinness World Record for the largest presentation of male genitalia before a public audience, Todd Rohal spoke of being down in the dumps before making his fifth feature, arguing that when the world was making him feel like trash, he wanted to make it as personal heroes such as John Waters and Doris Wishman would without any regard for good taste. Adapting Johnny Ryan’s comic book with a plot no more sophisticated than its title as a mother tries to find a sexual partner for her eyesore of a middle-aged child, there was concern from the author that they’d actually have to have an actual kid on set to play the daughter of Sandi, who is kidnapped by the deranged mother (Robert Longstreet) for her son Fabian (Steve Little, under heaps of makeup) to defile, which the “Catechism Cataclysm” director assured wouldn’t be an issue, not only from a public perception angle, but that he’d stage things in such a way that she wouldn’t really know what was happening. And at the premiere, young Kenzie Colmery was none the wiser about what transpired, only coming out for the Q & A when she’ll have to wait a few years to see what she was involved with.
The thought and effort that must’ve gone into protecting Colmery on set in the service of such a juvenile endeavor is ultimately the kind of attention that makes “Fuck My Son!” worthwhile in spite of its paper-thin premise. No sooner than entering the theater, you are handed a set of glasses that show that Rohal hasn’t missed a trick to elevate the puerile affair to a cinematic event, which the director inferred that he intends to replicate as he self-distributes the film with no plans to ever sell to a streamer. Whether he’d find any takers if he did put it up for sale is an open question when there’s no doubt the audience for such a corrosive comedy is limited to a select group of sickos, but for the filmmaker who has long had the talent to be spoken of in the same breath as his classmates at the North Carolina School of the Arts such as Danny McBride and David Gordon Green, touching bottom as far as taste is concerned gives rise to some of his most inspired comic ideas.
It would be a shame to spoil what the glasses are for, but they play into the first five minutes of “Fuck My Son!” offering a fair warning of the depravity ahead, after which the film places audiences behind another pair of lenses as Longstreet’s Vermina spies on Sandi and her daughter Bernice as they shop of clothes via a pair of binoculars. Rohal doesn’t avoid the queasy implication that you’re just one of the many perverts spying on the two, particularly when the store they end up at has its share of peepholes to look in on older women in various states of undress, but there does seem to be something a little extra about Vermina, who fools Bernice in the parking lot to take her hostage and ultimately ends up taking her back to her house for her son’s pleasure, with the nagging issue of having to deal with her young daughter as well. Quite literally, the main obstacle preventing intercourse from happening after Sandi begrudgingly agrees to sex simply to get out of the situation is finding Fabian’s penis under all the slabs of mutated fat that cover it up.
Even for those prepared for it, the vulgarness of “Fuck My Son!” can become wearisome over an hour-and-a-half, though Rohal does find several amusing bits the futile attempts by characters to rationalize their behavior or justifying a very slippery set of morals. (For instance, Vermina is strangely unwilling to listen to Sandi’s offer of procuring a prostitute as a replacement for herself when paying for sex would cross a line.) As ridiculous as the film gets, neither Longstreet or Newton suggest they’d approach Shakespeare any differently, giving passionate turns where their intensity creates actual stakes. Rohal also has serious collaborators in cinematographer Benjamin Kasulke, who reminds he once worked with Guy Maddin with the film’s ecstatic fantasy sequences, and makeup maestros Robert Kurtzman and Marcia King, who convincingly makeover Longstreet and Little into monsters with a touch of humanity about them. It isn’t just the central idea that’s outrageous, but the ends Rohal goes to give it weight when for instance, there’s no less than three variations of a “Fuck My Son!” theme song performed in entirely different styles of music and in a film that could so easily strike one note, it feels as if the writer/director has convened world-class orchestra to play it, creating a fever dream that may be the only place in the film where it feels safe for anyone to surrender.
“Fuck My Son!” will next screen at Beyond Fest in Los Angeles on September 26th at 10:15 pm at the Egyptian Theater.