QUESTIONABLE SUBTEXT MAKES THE UGLY F*CK MY SON! UGLIER

SPOILERS: In Todd Rohal’s F*CK MY SON!, an “old hag” named Vermina (Robert Longstreet) kidnaps a young mother (Tipper Newton) and her daughter (Kynzie Colmery), so that her grotesque adult-son Fabian (Steve Little, under pounds of prosthetics) can rape away his virginity. Since its Toronto premiere, the director has shipped his “X-rated” comedy (a rating that doesn’t exist anymore; it is more truthfully NR, or not rated) to U.S. cities promising an old-school night of no-holds-barred gross-out. It hits Australian screens via Monster Pictures from April 9.

For an old soul like mine, it’s mid level on the shock-o-meter. My dark teenage days watching VHS nasties, discovering such fun pics as THE KILLING OF AMERICA and SALO, OR 120 DAYS OF SODOM, or walking in on some guys watching some very specific ‘Euro-porn’, means I’m largely desensitised to warty dicks, what lives in skin folds and all manner of bodily secretions. If this is your first walk on cinema’s wild side, have at it, but progress to Adam Rifkin’s THE DARK BACKWARD for a truly inspired transgressive U.S. indie.

Distracted, I began searching for some kind of subtext in Rohal’s dirty-diaper of a film. The first question I pondered was, ‘Why is Vermina being played by a man?’ There’s no doubt it’s a dude in make-up and drag, but she has breasts and, we eventually learn, female genitalia. Is Rohal implying Vermina is transgender? Which doesn’t make sense if Fabian is her son. The film’s morality (and logic) gets murkier when we learn Fabian’s father is a local cop, played by black actor George Sample III (Fabian clearly calls him, “Daddy” at one point). Why a black actor? Is the blister- and shit-covered Fabian the by-product of a mixed-race marriage?

The deeper I let myself dig, the uglier this already ugly film seemed to get. Fabian’s appearance leans close to a brutal distortion of Down Syndrome physiology; the very real struggle that the physically-impaired endure to experience physical love seems a particularly insensitive premise, even for a rape fantasy like F*CK MY SON!; and, in a sequence that can only be construed as the most vile symbolism, Vermina bellows a German chant (“Kinder Brötchen!”) as she slams the oven door on the terrified child.

I don’t know Todd Rohal’s politics. I'm sure he just set out to make an underground movie yuck-a-thon. How some of the audience will apply their own set of values and beliefs to the material is not the filmmaker's problem, of course. Unless the filmmaker is speaking directly to that audience, which I'm certain he's not...