Maybe this is for me and not for you, because this is punk as f**k times infinity. The majority of the songs are classics by the Dayglo Abortions and they sound f*****g great, like they did back in the day on the Feed Us Your Fetus album my pal Heather lent me when she got back from squatting in Alphabet City. The walls are covered with these wild paintings of punk culture icons, all done by Kozak herself.
The outstanding art direction by Heather McDonald hearkens back to that classic Pat Moran look and has that same dark cutesy throb that runs through the best John Waters film. There are the old school diatribes about fundamentalist Christian oppression, female-enforced body dysphoria, and abortion restrictions; older concerns which are rapidly blistering, renewing. There is also the brilliant concept of portraying female objectification as a consumable disease. Yes, I was eating a candy necklace when I was watching this, and I happened to have one handy.
“Kozak has given us great transgressive cinema served on a sugar cone.”
Kozak takes the sexploitation genre and turns it inside out, making it feed upon itself. It goes big with traditional nudity in the beginning, because in order to make an omelet, you have to shake your eggs in some faces. And Kozak definitely has the eye to find those Meyer-like camera angles that can amplify ample posteriors. The rape is handled tastefully, with Kozak using the same face front low angle used in the rape in I Spit On Your Grave. As the film professes, the nudity thins out, being replaced by the rainbow colored precious bodily fluids.
The colorful special effects by Deb Graffenstyne and Kozak are like the mutant offspring of Frank Henenlotter and Lisa Frank. This goes triple for Kozak’s body paint designs of frosted legions bursting through the skin. Sugar Rot also may set a record for how much eating out it depicts. This feature has so many scenes of eating out that the MPAA should re-rate Blue Valentine PG-13. You won’t find this much eating out even in a Zagat’s guide. Even the glorious poster has sneezing in the cabbage right below the title. I was tempted to put on one of my “Spot Me Kathy!” lobster bibs, which I wear to certain comedy concerts. Sugar Rot is the shiniest new metal stud on the leather belt of this Canadian filmmaker’s glorious body of work. Kozak has given us great transgressive cinema served on a sugar cone.
"…a plutonium grade flashpoint in the history of punk culture movies."
