6/10
Shakespeare would (might) have liked it (probably).
8 September 2013
Lloyd Kaufman and James Gunn give Shakespeare's classic tale of star-crossed lovers the Troma treatment, infusing the bard's play with the studio's trademark brand of gross-out gags, cartoonish violence, and sex and nudity. The result is typically tasteless and extremely juvenile, with wee, poo, fart, and penis jokes aplenty, but it also manages to be a surprisingly fun slice of nonsense, Kaufman and Gunn melding their lunacy with Shakepeare's prose to form a script that will delight Troma fans while somehow still managing to keep the whole affair surprisingly faithful to the original (at least until the ending).

Okay, Shakespeare probably didn't envisage Lemmy from Motorhead as narrator of his work, nor is it likely that he ever anticipated the addition of a kiddie-fiddling priest, Juliet (the lovely Jane Jensen) making it with (T)Romeo inside a Plexiglas box, or a mutant cow/Juliet equipped with a massive schlong, but he wasn't above using vulgar tactics of his own, as evidenced by the gore-fest that is Titus Andronicus, the incestuous nature of both Pericles and Hamlet, and the countless crude sexual innuendos in his other plays. In short, I like to think Will would have appreciated Kaufman and Gunn's efforts to please their audience.
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