Someone broke into my house last week, and none of the details from The Incident make much sense. While I was away at work, they kicked in my back door, napped in my bed, and stole only my denim jacket (leaving all of the usual go-to items untouched – cash, drugs, tools, electronics, etc). They also left behind a relatively pristine pair of Nikes, wedged between the rain barrel & wall of my side porch. The Incident was jarring and, I guess, mildly violating, but because there were no signs of significant theft or intent to return, it all felt weirdly unserious. It was in that rattled, baffled headspace that I made a trip to the Zeitgeist Theatre to catch a screening of The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man with friends (after reinforcing the security of my back door, of course). Based on a true story, The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man is a microbudget comedy about a fecal terrorist who dumped buckets of piss & shit on his fellow Torontonians in 2019, seemingly at random. It was a violent, traumatizing crime spree that was obviously a total nightmare for all victims soaked in the disturbed man’s soupy diarrhea. However, as the meme-referencing title indicates, there’s no way to tell that story without acknowledging that the details of the violation are, in a way, unserious. As a movie prop, a bucket of diarrhea, while disgusting, is inherently a little funny.

First-time director Braden Sitter Sr. is surprisingly sincere about the severe mental illness that would inspire someone to attack strangers with buckets of his own filth. The majority of The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man‘s 80-min runtime is dedicated to psychologically profiling the mentally unwell loner who resorted to fecal terrorism as an alternative to committing suicide.  Rishi Rodriguez stars as the enigmatic Miguel, an unemployed incel who spends most of his time doing drugs and jerking off to Virtual Reality dinosaur porn. After a few horrific LSD trips through his social media feeds, Miguel is inspired by a pigeon that shits on his head to find a new way to connect with his fellow Torontonians, having already been failed by familial, professional, and romantic relationships. He undergoes a spiritual rebirth by dumping his first diarrhea bucket on his own naked body at a construction site, emerging as a kind of Shit Christ (an escalation of the infamous Piss Christ of the 1980s). The subsequent shit-bucket attacks are self-justified by a volatile mixture of Miguel’s religious psychosis & governmental conspiracy paranoia, represented onscreen in long sequences of triple-exposure psychedelic montage layering cheap, digital photography; it’s essentially Combat Shock updated for the smartphone era. None of Miguel’s victims are privy to his illness or reasoning, though. All they know is that they were peacefully walking through a public space, and now they’re soaked in shit.

Besides that dramatic sincerity, the most surprising thing about The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man is that it’s not necessarily the piss & shit itself that earns all of the biggest laughs. Those laughs are earned by the custom-made parody songs about the piss & shit – all credited to The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man Band and all comedy gold. Familiar pop tunes from bands like The Beatles, The Who, Nirvana, Pixies, and CCR are reworked with lyrics about “pee pee” & “poo poo” in an aggressively juvenile commitment to the bit. Those parody tunes are reserved exclusively for the montage sequences that will draw most of the film’s cult-cinema notoriety: nonstop Jackass-style stunts in which innocent pedestrians are covered in shit. It’s a brilliant move, comedically, since the parody song lyrics add a fresh novelty to the centerpiece shit-bucket sequences that might become numbingly repetitive without it. Otherwise, most of the humor is crass, honest acknowledgement of the unrelenting hell of modern living. While Miguel is having his own mental health crisis isolated in his (literally) shitty apartment, his victims are introduced in standalone vignettes dealing with the constant annoyances of contemporary shitty city living: being hit on by shitty “friend-zoned” nice guys, being polite about friends’ shitty poetry, constantly being asked for obvious directions by clueless, shitty tourists. It’s all just shitty enough to make a man want to lash out Travis Bickle-style and leave his own shitty mark on the world. It’s also all deeply unserious and fixable with just the tiniest morsel of basic human empathy.

-Brandon Ledet