Monsturd

Year of Release: 2003
Genre: Horror / Comedy
IMDB Rating: 4.1 / 10
Level of Awful: Requires Post-Film Lobotomy

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

Let’s start this review off on a good note, shall we? As years of experience have taught me, some of the most effective horror movies ever made have been brilliant not because they contained buckets of blood, ridiculously involved plots or were produced on a budget of millions of dollars – they were brilliant because the premise was simple. Monsturd fulfills all of the above criteria: the ‘gore’ is a distinct shade of brown but doesn’t happen very often,  the plot is confused rather than involved, it certainly wasn’t made on a very large budget and the premise is so simple it was scraped off the bottom of a very deep barrel. I know it wasn’t meant to be serious and I am aware that there are people out there that enjoyed it but for me, personally, when the toilet humour actually involves being sucked down into a toilet it all gets a little bit too much. As a precaution to those that may watch this movie it makes ridiculous use of short and stubby scenes, so be prepared to be thrown backwards and forwards from one area to another.

With master craftsmanship like this, it's no wonder prisoners are escaping all the time...

Monsturd is framed as a scary story told by a little girl to her father on a night of an intense red lightning storm. The evil scientists over at Dutech are hatching an evil scheme: to genetically mutate human faeces (or the bacteria in it, I’m not sure) so that it kills people. They will then sell these mutant strains to the government to be used as biological weapons. Meanwhile, over at the local prison, Jack Schmidt, the county’s most notorious serial killer, has managed to escape from prison and is on the run. His reputation as a killer is so great that the FBI has dispatched agent Hannigan, the woman responsible for bringing him to justice in the first place, to investigate. While Schmidt is on the run, we cut back a few times to Dutech where one of the experiments has gone wrong and a scientist has been killed by the bacteria. Not wanting to have his work exposed the head mad scientist, Dr Stern, melts the body in some form of toxic waste that contains the bacteria and dumps the mixture in the sewer system. Sadly for Schmidt, who has been running through the sewers in an attempt to evaid capture, the mixture acts rather like an acid and, when he lands up in a tank of sewer water which has been contaminated by the toxic waste, he melts (or, at least, his skin melts. The skeleton remains completely intact).

This is how Shakespeare first got all of his skulls too...

Of course, melting our criminal in the first 5 minutes and not doing something with it would make for a rather boring and short movie. Intent on finding out what’s in the sewer system Hannigan orders that tests be run on the water to see if there’s anything unusual in it. The team of scientists discover that in the petri dish brown stock footage of cell replication is being played. From this they deduce that the bacteria dumped into the sewer by Dr Stern has somehow managed to bond with Schmidt’s DNA, thus allowing the fast replicating pile of crap to take on Schmidt’s personality and desire to kill people who dare sit down on a toilet. This desire is soon acted on in an entirely different scene where a rather angry lady (either a wife or a landlady) holding a big knife tells her husband / tenant to go downstairs and clean the toilet. In this movie it would appear that men neither know how to use a toilet or how to clean it: it was a royal mess when he started cleaning and, half-way through the cleaning process, it was all over the walls. Thankfully the monsturd crawled out of the toilet at this point to kill the man and put him out of his ineptitude. And thus begins the reign of terror brought on by the shit man (the movie’s name for him, not mine).

Quite literally, a giant pile of shit.

While the shit man stalks the toilets and sewers in pursuit of fresh prey, the local sheriff and Hannigan realise that there’s big trouble in store for the town. For some unexplainable reason the town council doesn’t believe them when they are informed that a homicidal turd has made the sewers its lair and are unwilling to cancel the upcoming chilli fair as it provides the town with about a quarter of its annual income (from this I deduce that either the chilli is REALLY good or the town is REALLY poor). With no support from the upper echelons of local government it falls to Hannigan, some random guy in a truck and some local policemen to do battle against the monster before the townsfolk begin to feel the effects of the chilli contest. But how exactly does one do battle with a giant pile of shit that has decided it wants to capture and eat you? Simple. You gather as much anti-dierrhea medication as you can find, load it into water pistols and let the beast have it! As a finishing touch you also let a million (no more, no less) plastic, snickering flies loose to eat whatever’s left behind. That’s how a true hero defends their town against an angry, murderous pile of shit!

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• Children, from an early age, have a natural knowledge of the government’s use of bio-weapons.
• Somewhere in the world there are scientists dedicated to mutating shit.
• If you don’t want anyone to know you’re talking about sex, use doughnut code.
• Arguments with a ventriloquist dummy can become very violent, very quickly.
• Drunks are easily lured with a beer can on a rope.
• People aren’t really surprised when a half-rotten corpse suddenly comes to life and starts screaming.
• Flies are a shit man’s natural enemy.
• A million flies can be easily stored in a cat box.

MONSTURD TRAILER