Some titles just sell themselves. My local cinema recently held a double-bill night of decadent steaming trash with the original and updated Toxic Avenger films, attended by good-hearted cult film fanatics with laughter loaded in their bellies. Ready for an evening of yucks and yacks, they were not prepared for the trailer that came before it. A shot of the Toronto skyline. Paranoid narration about attacks across the city. Filthy people running around in panic, dripping with unknown matter. A smiling man in a hard hat waving at the camera. The title? The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man. The crowd goes wild. They will never be as loud and mirthful again for the remainder of the night.
With such a strong-smelling name that is enough to inspire fits of laughter in swathes, how does the film itself chalk up? The answer to that will depend entirely on how willing you are to surrender to a film bearing that very name, which mercurially changes from moment to moment with freeing energy and joyous abandon. An admirably committed experiment from Toronto up-and-comer Braden Sitter Sr., The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man takes a real-life incident about a brief 2019 crime spree in the city’s university district where a crazed man in a hard hat dumped seaside buckets of pee and poo over unaware victims. Such an act made the attacker (Samuel Opoku) a local legend, immediately giving him a distinctive name and inspiring a local artist to (loosely) make a film about him. The assailant in Sitter Sr.’s version is Miguel (Rishi Rodriguez), an on-edge loser whose dabble with LSD causes him to snap, falling down a conspiracy rabbit hole that sees him rail against his (possibly fictional) CIA handler (Afroz Khan) and a local underground film programmer (Reg Hartt) in a primal scream into the void. The city streets have a new supervillain on their hands, one whose weapons of choice are a well-chosen high spot, a bucket for building sandcastles and all the excrement he can get his grubby mitts on.
To say The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man contains multitudes may feel like sarcasm; I assure you, it is completely sincere and unexpectedly accurate as a snapshot of our post-pandemic disregard for our fellow man.
Even at a breezy 79 minutes, it would be very possible for The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man to outstay its welcome. Thankfully, Sitter Sr. does well to mix its palettes and create something truly unpredictable at every turn, mixing an easy-going ensemble hangout flick energy of Kevin Smith with the outrageous prankster humour of the Jackass boys. Its structure feels loose initially but is deceptively smart; just when you think you’ve seen more humiliating dunkings than your stomach can handle, he swerves into something enlightening about modern ways of living, from how we talk to strangers on the street to the soullessness of the contemporary dating scene. To say The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man contains multitudes may feel like sarcasm; I assure you, it is completely sincere and unexpectedly accurate as a snapshot of our post-pandemic disregard for our fellow man.
Sitter Sr. folds in recognisable faces from cult Canadian comedy; Kids in the Hall’s Paul Bellini has a memorably eccentric role, while fans of Kenny vs. Spenny will delight at seeing Spencer Rice turn up too. Yet it’s Rishi Rodriguez’s truly insane and locked-in performance as an absolute nightmare of a ‘random street guy’ that takes The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man from an amusing slacker comedy into an “oh, is this actually genius?” future cult classic. Willing to get down and dirty for his art, Rodriguez’s devilish smile and deadpan delivery is the core of the film’s off-kilter sense of humour, which is at once venomously nasty and affectionately flippant. In making its horrible anti-hero genuinely compelling company, The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man manages to make its harder-to-digest elements all the more palatable.
And, yes, ‘palatable’ is probably the last word that will come to mind for anyone interested in seeing this strange and troubling true-crime sensation, yet when seen with a crowd, it’s tough to beat. UK audiences are imminently due to be treated to screenings in Manchester’s Cultplex (5th September) and Newcastle’s Tyneside Cinema (16th September), both of which are opportunities to laugh into the abyss with game audiences on exactly the same page as you. A film designed to provoke both chuckles and walkouts (for the weak), The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man is making its (skid)mark in the ways only proper outsider cinema can: messily, stinkily and with intent to cause any reaction you’re willing to give it.
THE PEE PEE POO POO MAN IS PLAYING AT SELECTED CINEMAS NATIONWIDE
