Tromeo and Juliet
Apr 30th, 2020
Director: Lloyd Kaufman
Starring: Jane Jensen, Will Keenan
Country: United States
Year: 1997
Weird Score: 8.5 /10
It gets weird when: This movie never pretends to be anything other than weird. You get full force weirdness from the opening credits. Chopped off fingers, a monster gremlin snake penis, awkward father daughter bedtime talks, cow costumes, lots of cured meat, shackles, chains, handcuffs and nipple piercings. This is the most colourful Shakespeare adaptation to date.
I was 18 years old and working at Old Navy when Tromeo and Juliet was first introduced to me. In between pretending to sell performance fleece and basic tees, a coworker of mine asked me to hang out one evening and watch a movie. Little did I know that soon I would be down a rabbit hole and into the bizarre world of Troma movies. Imagery that I can never unsee and haven’t forgotten to this day. My coworker and I have since lost touch but I will always look back fondly on him as “that guy who made me watch that weird movie where a girl explodes with popcorn.” Yes that’s just one of the bizarre dream sequences that our star-crossed lover Juliet Capulet experiences in this 1 hour and 47 minute odyssey of pure fuckery.
This is the film version of Romeo and Juliet that your cool younger English teacher wanted to show you but with better judgement decided to stick with Franco Zeffirelli’s more appropriate 1968 version. It would be hard to explain to the school board why students were shown a movie featuring incest, daddy issues, countless sex scenes, gratuitous violence and narrated by Motorhead’s Lemmy. It’s set in Manhattan with the general storyline of Romeo and Juliet but with a potpourris of bizarre characters, revealing costumes, punk music and a whole lot of B movie fun.
If you decide to watch Tromeo and Juliet you are sure to have a good campy time, as it is the only version of a Shakespearean tale that made me laugh, gag, feel 90s’ nostalgia, yell “hey isn’t that Kirk from Gilmore Girls”, and make me want to take ten showers and go to Church.
It will get weird if you talk about this movie at: your classical Shakespearean scene study class, a job interview, in a conversation about romantic comedies and the other person’s favourite one is Maid in Manhattan, while discussing the infamous monster gremlin snake penis scene you say “ya that’s what mine looks like.”
