Messy, Mean, and Meticulously Chaotic

Read Time:6 Minute, 6 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
#ShakespearesShitstorm
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Genre: Comedy, Horror, Musical, Satire
Year Released: 2020, 4K 2025
Runtime: 1h 34m
Director(s): Lloyd Kaufman
Writer(s): Lloyd Kaufman, Brandon Bassham, Gabriel Friedman
Cast: Lloyd Kaufman, Erin Patrick Miller, Kate McGarrigle, Debbie Rochon, Monique Dupree, Amanda Flowers, Catherine Corcoran, Zac Amico
Where to Watch: available October 21, 2025, pre-order your copy here: www.mvdshop.com or www.amazon.com

RAVING REVIEW: #SHAKESPEARES SHITSTORM is not a movie that asks to be loved; it dares you to walk out, then tries to win you back by being so committed to its own rancid aesthetic that resistance turns into a weird kind of admiration. Another creation from Lloyd Kaufman’s Tromaville is a gleefully disgusting riff on The Tempest. As with so much of Troma’s history, the boundary isn’t the line you cross—it’s the runway you run down headfirst. The film’s new 4K release provides the perfect excuse to revisit an entry that doubles as a manifesto: cinema as an inside joke, protest, and plumbing emergency.

Kaufman plays both Prospero and his corporate-villain sister Antoinette, setting up a revenge saga that spits satire at Big Pharma, culture wars, and anyone within range. The plot is aggressively literal: a scientist discovers a cure for opioid addiction, gets ruined by pharmaceutical tyrants, and orchestrates their humiliation in Tromaville via a catastrophic storm fueled by whale laxatives. That premise is ridiculous even by Troma standards, and the movie knows it. The question isn’t realism; it’s whether the anarchy makes a point beyond shock. Often, yes. Not always. But even when it trips, it trips forward.

The secret (if you can call it that) is how meticulously this chaos is constructed. Troma’s low-budget style has always masked a fierce sense of blocking, timing, and cut-to-cut escalation. The jokes are crass, the imagery is smugly revolting, but the setups and payoffs are engineered with a vaudevillian pulse that rarely misses a beat. A cheap rubber effect becomes funny because the edit refuses to hide anything. And just when you think the movie has exhausted itself, it turns a corner and discovers three more bits of chaos.

Kaufman’s self-parody anchors the tone; he’s playing both the vengeful wizard and the corporate ghoul, and he gives each side just enough theatricality to feel like dueling mascots of the film. Debbie Rochon makes every line feel like it was sharpened on a broken bottle. Kate McGarrigle, Amanda Flowers, Monique Dupree, and a sprawling ensemble of Troma diehards embrace the material’s nastiest edges without losing the grin that keeps it palatable. Even the cameos—some infamous, some beloved—fit the logic of a world where civility is a myth and megaphones are truth.

The satire will be the sticking point for many. Troma has always traded in equal-opportunity insult comedy, and this script is no exception—taking swings at Big Pharma one minute and dunking on self-serious online scolds the next. Sometimes the targets feel dead-on, especially when the film rails against profiteering off pain; other times the barbs are broad enough to graze allies and enemies alike. That scattershot quality is part of the brand’s punk DNA, but it will read as blunt or dated for viewers expecting nuance. The counterargument is that Troma isn’t in the nuance business; it’s in the wake-up-and-smell-the-sewage business.

If you come for the gross-out, you’ll leave… well, changed. There are set-pieces here that belong in a Tromatic hall of fame, executed with a commitment to practical effects that makes the gags feel tactile in a way modern genre comedy rarely does. Foam, latex, corn syrup, and an ocean of fake discharge have never looked more, uh, lifelike. Grain and texture give the DIY craft a perverse beauty; colors pop, and the sheer hand-made audacity of the effects work is more visible than ever.

As a take on The Tempest, the movie is less interested in fidelity than in the skeleton: exile, storm, vengeance, reconciliation. Every aspect gets tromatized, sometimes cleverly, sometimes like a sledgehammer through drywall. Prospero’s manipulations become a running commentary on director control; the push-pull between art and audience as a food fight where both sides end up wearing the meal. It’s not a stretch to see Kaufman writing himself into the text: a fringe filmmaker who’s spent a lifetime conjuring storms to punish institutions he sees as corrupt.

There’s no denying the longevity of Troma’s DIY ethos. In an era where corporate satire is often sanded smooth by the very systems it mocks, this movie remains stubbornly handmade, proudly abrasive, and impossible to confuse with a focus-group production. That matters. There’s value in art that refuses to be agreeable, even when it stumbles. And for fans who grew up on THE TOXIC AVENGER, CLASS OF NUKE ’EM HIGH, and POULTRYGEIST, this plays like a summation—crasser, louder, and weirdly heartfelt about its mission to keep midnight-movie culture alive.

This feels like peak late-period Troma: wildly offensive by design, frequently hilarious, occasionally exhausting, and surprisingly sharp when it locks onto the rot it wants to expose. It’s too much by intention. And yet, beneath the sewage, there’s a consistent argument for independent cinema as a public nuisance with purpose. Made for Troma faithful and midnight-crowd diehards; maybe not so much for the regulars who prefer their satire less covered in, well, storms… If the question is whether it earns the 2025 4K showcase, the answer is yes. The storm still rages, uglier than ever, and weirdly beautiful in its refusal to behave.

Bonus Materials:
Introduction by Lloyd Kaufman
Producers and Cast Commentaries
A Heaping Serving Of Troma!
Theatrical Trailers
Radiation March
I've Been Tromatized!
Troma In Times Square!
Full Length Behind The Scenes Documentary
Tromalbania
Original Songs From The Movie

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[photo courtesy of TROMA FILMS, MVD ENTERTAINMENT]

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