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TROMEO & JULIET
Rating: 
USA. 1996.
Director – Lloyd Kaufman, Screenplay – James Gunn & Lloyd Kaufman, Producers – Michael Herz & Lloyd Kaufman, Photography – Brendan Flynt, Music – Willie Wisely, Makeup Effects – Louis Zaharian, Production Design – Rochelle Berliner. Production Company – Troma.
Cast:
Will Keenan (Tromeo Que), Jane Jensen (Juliet Capulet), Maximillian Shaun (Cap Capulet), Valentine Miele (Murray Que), Steve Gibbons (London Arbuckle), Flip Brown (Brother Lawrence), Debbie Rochon (Ness), Sean Gunn (Sammy Capulet), Patrick Connor (Tyrone Capulet), Earl McKoy (Monty Que), Gene Terinoni (Detective Ernie Scalus), Jacqueline Tavarez (Rosy), Garon Peterson (Fu Chang), Lemmy (Narrator)
Plot: Cap Capulet and Monty Que, former partners in the New York porn film industry, have bitterly split. Their extended families violently feud whenever they meet. However when Monty’s son Tromeo invades a Capulet masked ball, he and Cap’s daughter Juliet become entranced with one another. Despite the family feud and her pending marriage to geekish meat merchant London Arbuckle, they try to find love together.
Baz Luhrman’s campy teen updating of Shakespeare in Romeo +& Juliet (1996) clearly proved a heaven-sent opportunity for filmmakers/distributors Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz. Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz, under their Troma Films bandwagon, have either made or distributed such masterpieces of good taste as The Toxic Avenger (1986), Class of Nuke ‘Em High (1986), Surf Nazis Must Die (1987), Stuff Stephanie in the Incinerator (1989), Chopper Chicks in Zombietown (1991), A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell (1991), Pterodactyl Woman in Beverly Hills (1994) and Teenage Catgirls in Heat (1997) – all actual titles. Romeo +& Juliet provided them with the opportunity to make the perfect punning title on their company name and an opportunity to launch into the current Shakespearean cinematic vogue with considerable gusto. Tromeo & Juliet was their biggest budgeted film up to that point and one of the few Troma films to ever get a cinematic release. And surprisingly enough it received coverage in several quite serious film magazines.
With Tromeo & Juliet, the basic gag – a bad taste rendition of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet – comes completely upfront and is all that there is to the film. Much of it seems to be a game of how many bad taste variations on the play the film can conduct – thus the Montagues and Capulets become former partners in the porno industry; Juliet and the Nurse do lesbian scenes together; Romeo whacks off to adult cd-roms with titles that are bad taste Shakespeare puns like As You Lick It and Much Ado About Humping; the priest sympathizes with Romeo and Juliet’s frustrated romantic woes, whereupon the film cuts to daydreams of him frolicking with young boys and so on ad infinitum. And when the film runs out of perverse things it can do with Shakespeare it packs as many gooey meltdowns, limb severings, head splatterings, bad taste gags and unfaked on-camera nipple piercings as it possibly can. The constant reaching for effect becomes rather tedious and the exceedingly slim premise just too cute. The end credits are filled with jokes – including the credit writer listing an 0800 number for “women with big melons” to ring him – that run nearly as long as the legitimate credits do.
There are odd moments where Tromeo & Juliet achieves a kind of flaky cod sincerity that is about as near to playing it straight as Troma ever gets. And some of its collusions of Shakespearean prose and modern colloquialism – “What light from yonder plexiglass ....” or “Parting is such sweet sorrow,” “Yeah, totally sucks” – prove occasionally amusing. But in all other regards – the bad acting, the cartoonishly silly violence, the absurdly unconvincing makeup effects and constant straining for bad taste – Tromeo & Juliet is well and truly a Troma film.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1998
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