"He's About To Have One Crappy Day"
Jack has a good if somewhat smelly life. He has a beautiful wife and a lovely home in a charming town, and if maintaining that life means occasionally being coated in goo, he s fine with that. Jack s a plumber. A good one. And so when his town is stricken by a contaminated water crisis, it s down to Jack to find and solve the problem while the residents are evacuated to cleaner pastures.
But things don t go as planned. Sure, Jack finds the source of the problem deep in a long forgotten sewage treatment holding tank, but he s not alone in the plant and the unfriendly denizens trap him within the fetid tank with no food or clean water. And so begins a lengthy and repulsive transformation.
The opening of this movie is pure gross-out, if you have issues with vomit or bowel movements you may want to avoid eating your dinner around the time of watching. The movie itself is very sleek looking, great lighting work and excellent direction, this in itself takes what appears on the outset to look like your average Troma movie and raises the bar. I admit when I first got this movie to review I was expecting a modern-day Toxic Avenger, instead what I got was a movie that was more intelligent and slick than I originally gave it credit for.
The acting performances are surprisingly good and so are the make-up effects, the sound effects are the hidden gem within this movie, there is a particular scene which involves "teeth sharpening" the sound of which sent shivers down my spine. Yes the movie does have it's fair share of gross-out moments (well what do you expect from a movie called Septic Man), but it has a charm of it's own too. I have seen many reviews over the internet raving about this movie, saying how great it was and I can see what they mean. This movie is a cult classic waiting to happen, and once the audience discovers it I feel it will take off big time.
Septic Man is available now from Sharp Teeth Films in the UK. Sadly the DVD itself is a barebones release with only trailers for other releases on the disc itself. The presentation of the movie however is perfectly acceptable for a DVD release. As the DVD is in PAL format for the UK audience there is no signs of picture jitter (which can happen when an NTSC or FILM source gets encoded to PAL format), it's a smooth ride throughout. Audio is clear and sharp (especially the teeth sharpening noise *shudder*) and it is presented in Anamorphic Widescreen. All in all a beautiful image from Sharp Teeth Films. The only lacking is the extras.
Overall Rating: 3/5