Sexsquatch: The Legend of Blood Stool Creek (2012) 0

     I knew this was a terrible idea when I thought of it. I won’t say that Juniper has higher standards than I do when it comes to movies, but there are certain things she absolutely will not touch. We’ll look at the same trailer or DVD cover art thinking, “Jesus, that looks awful,” but whereas her next thought will be a sensibly firm “Fuck that,” I’m stupidly going, “Challenge accepted!” So when a family emergency called Juniper away to the old homestead for a few weeks, I conceived a foolhardy scheme indeed. While my auxiliary voice of reason was two states away, I was going to take on the most inauspicious contents of my long-neglected screener pile. And nothing in that pile looked less promising than Sexsquatch: The Legend of Blood Stool Creek. This is some straight-up Tomb of Anubis shit here, and I’m not going to lie— I came very close to tapping out and tossing the disc straight into the trash can. At 7:27— that’s seven minutes and twenty-seven seconds!— I was already cursing aloud at my TV set, and Sexsquatch only got worse from there.

     I gather that Sexsquatch is the product of a more or less stable underground filmmaking collective. For one thing, virtually all of the cast-members have some combination of the following movies listed on their IMDb pages: Death O’Lantern, Happy Helladays, and Stoinky Beach, plus a series of films about a place called Blood Fart Lake. Beyond that, Sexsquatch begins with an introduction by a hooded character called the Warlock, whom we’re apparently supposed to recognize. And finally, this picture has about it the flavor of an inside joke run amok, which process I remember very well from my own adolescent dabbling in backyard cinema. Anyway, the premise here is that Stink Fist the Sexsquatch (Rod Bollo Skin), a sort of pervert space yeti, has come to Earth on a bet with the ruler of his world to see which of them can rape and murder more humans over the course of the weekend. Stink Fist begins by taking out a couple (Nick Peron and Nichole LaRoche) who have no connection to anyone or anything else in the movie.

     There’s a good chance the alien sex criminal is going to win that bet, because in a lakeside house not far away, polyandrist nymphomaniac Crystal (Anne Marie Nouvo, aka Christy Kassler) and her boyfriends, Leo DeChamp (Tobe Lerone, aka Josh Squire) and Skippy (Steven Deniro, aka Andrew Baltes), are planning a party to help divest their hopelessly square pal, Joey Jeremiah (Chip Rockcastle), of his virginity. They’ve invited two of their cutest and most sexually adventurous friends, Jennifer (Savanna Ramone, aka Heather Maxon) and Mudhoney (Varla Darling), to compete for the honor, plus hard-drinking dude-bros Lance (Peter Lieberman, aka Alec Lambert) and Lucas (Dutch Hogan, aka Clint Kelly) to console the loser. Joey’s trashoid mom (Francine Mitchell) will presumably catch whatever penile crumbs fall from that table. But along the way, the revelers make the mistake of snubbing the insane neighbor lady, Marmalade (Spamuel L. Jackson), so that she pronounces her curse upon the party. In and of itself, that would be no big deal, but when Marmalade encounters Stink Fist while taking a shit in the woods, she acquires a powerful instrument of vengeance indeed. All she has to do is to point the Sexsquatch in the right direction.

     What we have here is a movie with a bad case of head Troma. A movie in which the sexual, scatological, or gore-based grossout is not just an end unto itself, but an end to which all other concerns are subordinated. A film in which sheer offensiveness is pursued not merely without reference to wit, intelligence, or the artful construction of a gag, but at all those things’ expense. A film whose creators have invested every bit of their slender creativity in a tireless quest for the vilest possible dysphemism, so that none of the characters can open their mouths without letting fly some new way of making sex or the anatomy associated with it sound thoroughly loathsome and despicable. Worse yet, writer/director Chris Seaver doesn’t even seem to care how (or indeed whether) his endless blasphemies against Eros roll off the tongue. There is simply no way to say any of this crap naturally, or with an appropriate emotional inflection, so Sexsquatch ends up sounding like a high school Shakespeare recital in which everyone suffers from Tourette Syndrome. It’s almost as if Seaver saw Tromeo and Juliet, and tried to duplicate it without understanding the joke. And of course it should go without saying that a sex-horror film from 2012 features absolutely no nudity. When I really think about it, that pisses me off more than anything. It makes the gratingly self-conscious rebelliousness of Sexsquatch look somehow phony— like it’s got a festering cyst of puritanism at its core. Throw in a score that consists primarily of repellant new-school white boy ska (the kind from which even the faintest hint of Jamaica has been assiduously bleached away), and the closest thing Sexsquatch has to a redeeming feature is the charmingly nonsensical nub of a musical number in which Lucas sings about the Ku Klux Klan adopting the highway behind his mother’s house— which is rendered twice as inexplicable for being inserted in the middle of Lucas’s impromptu funeral.

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