Review: #ShakespearesShitStorm

Coronado’s version of Hamlet had identical twins (one naked) play the Dane and Laertes while Helen Mirren famously doubled as Ophelia and Gertrude with Quentin Crisp as Polonius; Claudius was into BDSM and the players scene was inches from porn. The Rocky Horror Picture Show is done all over the world at all sorts of venues. Children welcome. Actual animal guts were used in 1897 at the famed Paris theatre of horror, Theatre Du Grand Guignol (which gave birth — in a peripheral way — to Hammer Films — which was once rated X and today is considered classic). Animal guts were again used in the 1960s for Night of the Living Dead. How’d that film do? And then, there’s John Waters.

And so we come to Troma Entertainment’s #shakespearesshitstorm, created by Maestro Lloyd Kaufman.

Coming into this film with a closed mind would be unwise. It is nothing like you may have ever seen. You might be startled or even repulsed by the ultra gratuitous but comic violence, excrement of OH SO MUCH variety, crass and even offensive humor triggering EVERYONE somewhere, and the total lampooning of Shakespeare down to a scene in a black box theatre discussing the play with morbidly obese and morbidly arrogant academics.
OR you can come into this knowing that all of this is just a smoke screen hiding a message that is simply one of the most powerful and blunt, “turning a mirror up to nature”…