Lemi from Motorhead narrates a 90’s punk retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, in true Troma films fashion – with lots of gore, deviant sex and silly humour. Feeling like America’s response to our own Bad Taste (1987) – but with a more thorough plot which arcs on our satirised heroes and feeds off the original play.
Tromeo Que (Will Keenan) is the hero of the story. In love with being in love, he must be a Pisces. He gets off on interactive CD Roms of naked ladies professing their love for him. His latest girlfriend is a slutty porn star-esque airhead with big boobs. She’s cheating on him with a Fabio lookalike. One wonders for what reason she is even bothering to date our Tromeo – he isn’t her type, he doesn’t have an incredible sex drive, he isn’t rich or famous.
Tromeo’s father is Monty Que (Earl McKoy) He’s black (Tromeo is white) and this isn’t discussed until late in the film in time for the big reveal. Benny Que (Stephen Blackehart) knows the history of the Que and Capulet war of the families. And Murray (Valentine Miele) pushes him into leaking the story when he’s really drunk one night.
Juliet Capulet (Jane Jensen) the daughter of Cappy Capulet (William Beckwith) has regular sex with the house cook, a skinny, young and attractive gothic lesbian with lots of piercings and tattoos. Juliet wants to be with a man but she is afraid of penises – monster penises fill her nightmares. But when she wakes up screaming she gets locked in the time out box by her abusive (and kinky) father.
Her mother (Wendy Adams) is barely a character – only chimes in at the end to finish the reveal – the mystery, the secrets of house Capulet and house Que.
My favourite scene is when Juliet’s cousin Sammy (Sean Gunn) gets his head trapped in a car window and is horribly injured when he breaks free – as the car is by this time going very fast.
The decapitated heads don’t look very realistic, which is a shame because a lot of the other gory effects work really well. They are disgusting and really sell the jokes.
Low budget FX movies are out there but the best and hardest working filmmaker of this niche is Lloyd Kaufman. Other heroes include Roger Corman and Brian Trenchard-Smith.
Sexual deviancy is a flavour refined in this film – though not as shocking as for example, Tim Roth’s The War Zone (1999) – it is merely played with here for the fun of it. Homosexuality, gay rape threats, incest, kinky abuse. But we only get a taste of it, perhaps because the plot is felt to be more important than the ‘exploitation.’
Lemi’s narration and the occasional old English prose dialogue is thrown fast and loose and can be at times difficult to understand. Much like live theatre of Shakespearean plays. However, these are dramatised so wonderfully that you can start to learn the language because you get the emotional context.
Tromeo and Juliet is punk and fun and silly and quite funny at parts, considering its low budget and the integrity behind the production – in a way, it is a perfect film for what it is. It serves the purpose of being silly and fun, grotesque and honest, introducing a new, A.D.D./MTV audience to the best of the oldest playwrights.
4.5 stars
the joy of eating and the folly of thinking 