Review: Artsy, gross-out movie ‘Kuso’ is not for the squeamish

The audience-testing art-film “Kuso� is the the first feature from avant-garde hip-hop musician Steve Ellison, a.k.a. Flying Lotus — a man who clearly grew up watching the midnight movies of yore. There are echoes of David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky, David Cronenberg, and even Frank Zappa’s “200 Motels� and Neil Young’s “Human Highway� in Ellison’s surreal, often stomach-turning exercise in shock and awe.

“Kuso� functions as a sort of video-album. There are through lines, mostly having to do with an earthquake in L.A., which unleashes some sort of plague of open sores. But the movie is mostly a series of sketches, united by Ellison’s preoccupation with the scatological. At times, “Kuso� feels like a literal adaptation of all the feces-focused tracks from classic Parliament/Funkadelic records — which probably explains the film’s George Clinton cameo.

Some scenes resemble alt-comedy Adult Swim shows, and feature some of their stars, such as Tim Heidecker and Hannibal Buress. Others are animated, in a variety of styles, from stop-motion to kaleidoscopic collages to culture-jamming mash-ups. (The best of the latter takes an old ’70s episode of “Match Game� and superimposes new mouths on Gene Rayburn and Richard Dawson.)

“Kuso� won’t be for everybody. It’s gross, it’s repetitive, and if it has a point, it’s hard to discern. But it’s not artless. Every densely layered image of oozing pus and gassy orifices is as imaginatively rendered as it is disgusting.

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‘Kuso’

Not rated

Running time: 1 hour, 34 minutes

Playing: Cinefamily, Hollywood; streaming on Shudder

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