Welcome back! It’s the third week of Troma Month here at B-Movie Enema and it’s time to go back, sorta, to the James Gunn well. This week, I’m gonna be talking about 1999’s Terror Firmer.

What do I mean about this sorta going back to the James Gunn well? That’s because, to a certain extent, Lloyd Kaufman, along with co-writers Douglas Buck and Patrick Cassidy, based this movie’s script, albeit loosely, on the 1998 book All I Need to Know about Filmmaking I Learned from the Toxic Avenger. That book was co-written by Kaufman and James Gunn.

I made the comment last week, in my review for Class of Nuke ‘Em High, that I kind of put Kaufman in the same camp as Roger Corman. Corman, back in the 50s and 60s, were cranking out cheap B-movies quickly. However, quickly those movies were, and however cheaply they were made, most (especially in today’s film culture) could not look at those movies and think they weren’t made professionally. Maybe the monster was kind of goofy, but you couldn’t argue that the cast was well-directed and doing their jobs professionally.

I bring up that commentary I made because Roger Corman wrote the introduction to the book this is sort of based on.

All I Need to Know about Filmmaking I Learned from the Toxic Avenger is part biography of Lloyd Kaufman and part fantasy concocted by Kaufman and Gunn. Some Troma employees had imaginary battles with Kaufman. One of the editors at the company was portrayed as a villain (to that guy’s delight and approval). Generally speaking, Gunn used some of what he knew about Kaufman directly and made up some fun stuff to help illustrate who Lloyd Kaufman is as an idea and personality in the independent and underground film world.

Now, add to that, Lloyd Kaufman plays a version of himself in this movie named Larry Benjamin. We also see some people being brought into this movie for bit parts. These include South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, Eli Roth, and Joe Lynch. We also bring back Tromeo himself, Will Keenan, as well as Lemmy and Debbie Rochon who both also appeared in Tromeo and Juliet.

Before we dive in, I do want to pull up a piece of trivia for this movie. There’s a special thanks credit in the movie to the New York City Police Department for their help throughout the production of the film. Well, that’s Lloyd being Lloyd. The production was constantly clashed with the NYPD. Well, I should say that the NYPD clashed with Lloyd’s production. At one point, it got so bad that the NYPD revoked the film permit. That’s impressively ballsy of the NYPD because Lloyd’s wife, Pat, was a big deal. You see… Pat is the Executive Director of the New York State Governor’s Office for Motion Picture and Television Development as well as the Deputy Commissioner of Empire State Development. She is the one who issues filming permits and draws productions into New York to help with the state’s economic income.

ACAB, amirite?

Alright, so we know we’re the right blog to be looking at a Lloyd Kaufman flick because if you get the two-disc special edition Blu Ray (easily available at a bunch of conventions or your favorite online dealer of discs) Disc Two contains a documentary about making this movie called Farts of Darkness. First of all, god bless you, Lloyd. Second, I’m surprised someone hasn’t made a parody called Farts of Darkness. Third, “Farts of Darkness” sounds like the title of the autobiography from my favorite pair of underwear. Or would that be my least favorite pair? No… the pair is a pair of French-cut, silky undies with a little lace, so it’s definitely my favorite.

Er…

Uh… Yeah, so the movie starts with a sexy babe walking along this fence. She’s doing that sexy 90s thing with a leather halter top and letter mini-skirt, right? Well, a guy says she’s just the pussy he’s been waiting for. So, what’s a girl to do when she gets unwanted advances from a weirdo? She rips his leg off with her bare hands and beats the guy to death with it.

She then finds a girl reading a magazine about the Toxic Avenger and catchin’ some rays in the sun. Our mysterious femme fatale just walks up to her and tears open the lady’s shirt. This is when we find out blondie is pregnant. Our sexy leather on top/leather on bottom sexy psycho tears open the woman’s womb, pulls out the fetus, and they play a little tug of war with the fetus before she finally takes the baby from the woman.

I don’t know what happened to the baby because the girl just walks off with it. However, her exploits have been captured in the papers. We see the headline about her killing the man with his own leg. We see the headline about her de-fetusing the lady. We then see how she killed a guy with cornflakes which labels her as a serial (read: cereal) killer. These murders have been going on for a bit and the authorities are useless. This woman is only listed in the credits as the Mysterious Woman. She’s played by Sheri Warden.

Things change up a bit when we think we see an old man blow his head into Scanners-like bits with a gun. That’s when we learn this is a movie set. We meet the various people involved with this production. We have director Lloyd Benjamin (Kaufman), actress Christine (Rochon), and Christine’s boyfriend, D.J., who doesn’t like ANYone to get near her. Most importantly, though, we meet Jennifer, played by Alyce LaTourelle, a new production assistant who is shy, but friendly. She has two guys she is interested in. The first is the kind of serious boom operator, Casey (Will Keenan), and the other is the special effects guy, Jerry (Trent Haaga).

The very best thing is Larry Benjamin, our director, is blind. We don’t, uh, see that (no pun intended) until he tries to calm down the overworked and over-tired Christine who just wants to go home after an incredibly long day of shooting. One thing I love about Kaufman when he appears in movies is how jovial he is. The man is living his best life. I don’t know if I’ve ever actually seen him talk seriously for more than five minutes before he’s dropping a joke or some sort of silly crude statement. But when he’s in a movie like this, he plays it almost overly naive. He plays this like an overgrown child. How can anyone not like Lloyd Kaufman?

Anyway, Larry knows how to appease Christine and keep her on set well past her contracted hours. All he has to do is make her feel extra pretty. He compares her to Marilyn Monroe which gets her to come around to staying on set for a couple more pick-up shots. She puts his hand on a tit and asks him how she looks and he, naturally, finds her very appealing.

Jerry and Casey don’t quite like each other. Casey comments that there’s more ways to express himself than covering everything in blood. Casey is just as dangerously violent as Christine’s fella. He throttles Jerry and generally threatens him. It looks like Jerry is going to get his revenge when he grabs Casey’s arm and appears to shove a knife through it, but, you know… he’s a prop guy. So that knife is fake.

Casey walks off to do some curls with the production’s dumbells when he sees Jerry talking up Jennifer. So, he offers Jennifer a chance to hold his boom mic. And by that, he makes it looks like the boom mic is his dick. This makes Jennifer’s squishy bits go squishy.

While, yes, we get our main characters around this production, the movie is moving a hundred miles per hour. Larry comes into the bathroom where a stud named Nikolai and Christine are fucking. Larry takes a piss but turns to his side not realizing he ends up pissing on the couple. He pisses on another assistant. Every line and every shot is loaded with insanity.

With everything happening around the set, the sound guy, Todd, quits. He returns to the frat house where he finds a very sexy, but mysterious brunette in a halter top and miniskirt. She comes onto Todd and agrees to go upstairs with him. There, she shoves his beer bong up his ass, dumps his bong bong into the funnel, and then dumps all his expensive cocaine in after it. She breaks his bong and uses it to stab him to death while she masturbates.

Another member of the film set is Larry’s daughter, Audrey. Audrey’s played by Kaufman’s own daughter, Charlotte Kaufman. Audrey doesn’t speak. Larry was once on a talk show called “The Morton Springer Show” in which Springer called Larry a whole lot of different words that equate to him being a degenerate. The audience got so worked up over the interview, they attacked Larry. Larry’s wife was caught in the middle of him and the attacking crowd and she was killed. Audrey hasn’t spoken since that day.

I love that the movie Larry is making is completely insane and nonsensical. There’s a scene of a father committing suicide and blowing his brains out. We have a recreation of Toxie getting fucked by his blind girlfriend. Sgt. Kabukiman is wandering around the set and has a big, dramatic monologue that they have to set up for at one point. It’s a nonsensical plot which is fine because all this is doing is celebrating Troma. It’s a big party with a loose plot involved.

Sure, there are things that are either coming from Lloyd’s past like his appearance on the Morton Downey Jr. Show in which the host ripped into him for the types of movies he makes, or just ways for him to put some of his most insane ideas about what Troma is into one movie. For those of you who don’t know who Morton Downey, Jr. was, he was one of the few proto-Jerry Springer talk show hosts. He’d have all sorts of different types of people on the show like Nazis or bad parents or crack addicts or whatever and he’d basically set them up like a freakshow. He’d rip into them in a tough, almost New Yorker sort of way, and basically use the audience as his peanut gallery to back him up as he treats people like shit for entertainment. There were others like that but he was the one who was the loudest and most annoying. This was the late 80s/early 90s version of what Jerry Springer would perfect in the late 90s into the 2000s. It was all sideshow.

And that’s what Terror Firmer is too. It’s all sideshow. It’s what people think is Troma. It’s gross. It’s perverse. It’s kind of a punk rock vibe within the indie film scene. This is nearly two hours long with no real plot. Yet, there are two sides of this movie that are plots of their own. On one side, you have the movie being made by Troma. On the other, you have the Mysterious Woman eventually killing members of the crew.

Jennifer and Casey go on a lunch date. Unfortunately, he asked her out for lunch just when Jerry was going to ask her to watch a movie with him. At first, it seems like the date is going well. They learn about each other’s pasts and they have some fun times with Casey’s pickles that he pickles himself (Casey is BIG on pickling shit), but he is about to strike out when he talks about going home to watch a Steven Spielberg movie, but she would rather watch a movie that Jerry loaned her. Casey just talks shit about Jerry the whole night and goes on and on about how much he finds big-budget, big-star Hollywood movies superior to Jerry’s taste in more artsy flicks. This does not make Jennifer’s squishy parts go squishy… That is until he says he likes her and she straddles him to make out and tell him she likes him too.

Buuut Casey is a bit lost in his own sauce because he breaks the kissing off to ask her if she would like some of his own pickled eggs.

Luckily, Jennifer goes tits out to say she’s serious about making him happy. He decides to go down on her, even using one of his pickles on her squishy bits. So it kind of seems like Jennifer and Casey are now a couple.

Earlier, we met Jacob Gelman, the main investor in Larry’s movie. He’s a big ol’ fat guy who has just the right amount of money and insider pull to get movies made, he’s constantly getting a little attention from all the sexy wannabe starlets on the set of the movie. He was there to see Jerry do a special effect with an escalator that was supposed to “eat” someone in the movie. Later, he has a run with the Mysterious Woman who claims she lost her contact lenses. He offers to help her get into the movie he’s financing and wants to take her to his office. However, on the way to his office, she kicks him down the escalator. When it brings him back to the top, she grabs the fire axe and starts hitting him with it. Then, just like in the movie he’s financing, the escalator starts eating him while she pushes him down like she’s putting him into a grinder.

The next day, Jennifer again reaffirms that she likes Casey and not Jerry. She says that she enjoyed eating his pickles the night before and wanted to know if he would like to do so again. Casey says that he plans on staying in tonight because he’s rented Titanic and he’s excited to watch it again for the first time.

Dejected, Jennifer wanders off. Everywhere she turns on set, she finds love being made. Passions are erupting all over the place. The lonely Jennifer can only go home and do what we all do on any ol’ Friday night.

What? You don’t do that on any ol’ Friday night? What are you… dating someone? Pishaw…

The next guy who dies does so on the set. Larry’s shooting a scene where a black guy is getting shot in a gangland shooting. A bunch of squibs go off in his torso. But then it looks like he gets shot in the forehead… something that was not set up as a special effect. Jerry discovers the guy is actually dead from a gunshot to the head. The show must still go on, though…

The next casualty is Old Phil. He was a member of the crew that’s been around Troma films for a long time. This time, he had taken on the role of Mad Cowboy, which is just a cow costume dressed up as a cowboy. He drops dead while filming a scene and shits himself. It’s a poignant moment in the film that is so important the film takes time to show the crew morning him as a team.

Old Phil… You put your life and your bowel movement on the line for art.

Right after everyone rallies around the death of Old Phil dedicated to making art and finishing this film, the guy leading the vigil, Steven, has a stage light fall on his head, electrocuting him in front of everyone. Jennifer tries to unplug the light to save the guy, but by the time she does, his face melts.

During Steven’s vigil, the next guy tries to pick up the spirits of the crew. He is careful enough to look around him to make sure nothing will fall on him, or no one will shoot him, or he won’t shit his pants like Old Phil. He launches in this speech to relay Larry’s belief that they can still make a great movie only to be crushed by two trucks.

Jennifer, again, rushes into action. The guy had his legs cut off beneath the knees from the steps on the back of the trucks, so she tries to help stop the bleeding with some tissues. She then tries to put his legs back onto his knees. Sadly, the man dies. But, again… the show must go on.

Another tragedy hits the production of this movie. Christine has been screwing lots of people on the set. That does not exclude the guy playing the Toxic Avenger. When they decide to fuck around during a break, D.J. finds them and freaks out. He uses a prosthetic leg to try to hit the other guy only for him to hit Christine and ruin her perfect nose. After both Christine and Toxie quit amid all the fighting this love triangle has created, Larry has to find replacements.

Jerry makes a case for him to play Toxie since he has been a fan of Troma films from an early age. To play the leading lady, Larry convinces Jennifer to step in. At first, she’s worried about the next scene being a sex scene. Casey protests, but Larry, and the rest of the crew, think this is a perfect fit for the movie, so she agrees. The scene goes really well. So well, in fact, Jerry admits that he loves Jennifer and they just decide to have sex right there on set. And since Casey is a drip who only wants to talk about his pickles and doesn’t want to do anything with his own fleshy one, this makes Jennifer’s squishy bits go squishy.

While Jennifer and Casey celebrate their new love and their new trajectories in the filmmaking business, the Mysterious Woman is picked up by a couple of French guys (played by real French comedy actors Edouard Baer and Joseph Malerba). While cruising the town with them, she gets sick and throws up all over herself and them. They drop her off and say she didn’t even have big breasts. She gets angry and goes to the set of Larry’s movie and shoots the giant fake tits off an actress.

Elsewhere, another member of the crew, Igor, is getting a cast made of his head for a head-crushing scene. After Jerry gets his head wrapped and tells him to wait until he gets back, something insane happens. Like… I really would love to know how Lloyd got this scene made because I cannot imagine there’s any way to do this legally. Perhaps that’s where that special credit for the NYPD comes into play. Here’s how it plays out…

A woman comes up and realizes Igor is completely unable to see or hear her. Thinking the thought of having sex with someone who is completely sensory deprived would be hot, she takes off his clothes and starts blowing him. When the Mysterious Woman shoots the actress’ fake tits, Igor hears that and freaks out and starts running around the set completely nude except for the bandage on his head. She he’s just running wild. He eventually ends up out in the streets of New York City. He is running around in broad daylight in Times Square, along the George Washington Bridge, in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and at that recreation of the Arc de Triomphe. This isn’t a situation where he looks naked. HE IS NAKED. His dick is flopping about everywhere.

Like, for real… How did they get this shot in so many places? And, sure, when he’s next to the river by the bridge, there aren’t many people around. It’s possible they were able to block that off. But not Times Square. There are very obviously people walking around and normal traffic passing by. By 1999, New York City was under the rule of Giuliani at the time. I cannot imagine he was letting naked men run around the streets of the city for a film. I have to believe a lot of these shots were stolen. It’s hilarious.

Not nearly as funny as how Igor eventually dies, though. He eventually falls into the street. Just so happens, the French guys are still driving around. Because of the Mysterious Woman’s puke covering the window, they can’t see clearly to drive. They hit a car and flip, landing directly on Igor’s head and crushing it just like the cast of his head would have been. But that’s not all. The people on the street start laughing at Igor’s naked body that’s all dick out and everything. The French guys get out of the car and when they see Igor’s crushed head, they throw up on each other. Then the car explodes.

Fucking masterpiece.

The Mysterious Woman goes back on the prowl. This time, she finds the ventriloquist who has been around the set of Larry’s movie with his dummy Popo. She says she’s a feminist prostitute. He wonders what that means so she shows him. She’s on her period without a tampon. She says tampons are a male-driven industry to cage feminine energy. While she humps his head, she pulls out a hatchet and cuts Popo off the guy’s hand and crucifies the dummy. She then stretches out the guy’s dick and kills him by having the dick snap back like a rubber band.

The Mysterious Woman returns to her room and removes her wig to reveal her true identity… CASEY!

I gotta admit… Casey fills out a dress or miniskirt nicely.

The next morning, Jennifer stops by on the way to the set to see if Casey’s doing okay. However, Casey’s still made up as the Mysterious Woman. When Jennifer comes in, she accidentally stumbles into a table that has a bottle of “Pickled Red Herring” before going into his bedroom. Inside the bedroom, she finds jars of pickled trophies of those he killed. He then enters the room and handcuffs Jennifer.

Casey’s motive is that he hates everyone. He tells her that his father said that to be a good man, Casey had to be a girl, and to be a real man, Casey needed to be fucked like a woman. Casey’s got a pair of tits and has whittled his dick down to a nub. He is not a woman. He’s not a man. He says he is nothing. Or sometimes he thinks he’s perfect. So, maybe he’s something and not nothing at all. I just know that 25 years later, an entire political party would come crashing down on this one guy for all of this.

He then attempts to rape Jennifer with his nub. She turns the tables on Casey and rapes him. That’s been a whole a thing that led to the sex scene that Jennifer and Jerry shot. Larry saw an interview the other night about a woman who turned the tables on her rapist and was empowered by actually enjoying it. Jennifer at the time wasn’t sure what that meant but after making Casey cum, he runs off while she freed herself from the handcuffs. She then discovers Casey’s father caged with a mutilated face.

Jennifer escapes and finds Jerry on set. She explains that Casey is a killer and that he’s a she or a she that’s a he. When Casey shows up on set, he’s got a bomb and says that it could have been Jerry, Jennifer, and Casey as a perfect triangle. He proclaims himself as a perfect third sex, neither man nor woman. The only way to solve this is to use the bomb to kill everyone.

Casey throws the bomb so it can take everyone out. To save everyone, Larry jumps on the bomb and explodes. With Larry now dead, the rest of the crew bands together to defeat Casey by using all sorts of stuff around on the set. Jennifer uses bromide to blind Casey while another crew member pours gasoline on him. Then, a guy who is always eating and farting on set is used to light a fart like a flamethrower to set Casey aflame.

Farts of Darkness indeed.

Now, if you’re watching this movie, and you’re watching Casey being set on fire by a lit fart, you have to wonder how there is still 15 minutes left in this movie. Well, it’s Larry’s first rule of his film sets: Safety to Humans. One of the crew members uses a fire extinguisher to put Casey out.

Casey then wants to kill Jennifer for ruining everything with his true love, Jerry. It’s a whole thing. Casey was really in love with Jerry the whole time and blames Jennifer for being too perfect and attracting Jerry. When he flipped out while they fucked on set, Casey was mad that Jennifer was fucking Jerry not that Jerry was fucking Jennifer. Seriously, it’s a whole thing. Anyway, Jerry tries saving Jennifer and jumps in front of the knife coming at her only for Casey to stab Jerry in the temple. Casey starts screaming. Jennifer’s screaming. Jerry’s freaking out. It’s now an extra whole thing.

Meanwhile, Audrey, super pissed that Casey killed her daddy, can now speak again. She picks up the boom mic pole and rams it into Casey’s self-made vagina. Now Casey is extra freaking out and screaming. Audrey eventually totally impales Casey through her/his vagina. Casey eventually dies while reaching out and holding Jerry’s hand.

Jerry survives, albeit with constant brain pain, and shows as much of the movie that could be edited together. He gives a speech about what Larry Benjamin fought for as a filmmaker. Now that he’s gone, Jerry and Jennifer want to finish the movie. They rally the troops and bring the crew together to finish this masterpiece Larry died to finish.

Is Terror Firmer a good movie? Ha! No. It really isn’t when you compare it against Tromeo and Juliet. However… It is perfectly Troma. I mentioned that in so many words earlier. This is the movie we think of as Troma. Like, when you think of Troma, you think of Lloyd Kaufman just sitting on a shitter one day, ripping a fart, and then coming up with an idea of having a naked guy running through the streets of NYC before a car driven by French actors with puke covering the window lands on his head. Then he has an explosive bowel movement and he runs to the typewriter, unwiped, pants still down around his ankles, and he bangs it out on said typewriter before totally forgetting to clean himself up.

That’s Troma. That’s Terror Firmer. It’s a hilarious movie that you simply cannot recommend to anyone who isn’t already a Troma and/or Lloyd Kaufman fan. In a way, it’s a beautiful tip of Lloyd’s own cap to himself for what he and so many others who loved working for him did for about 15 years from the release of The Toxic Avenger to the making of Terror Firmer. About 20 or so years later, Lloyd would celebrate the insanity of Troma once again with another balls-to-the-wall comedy that mixes in his love of the Bard himself with #ShakespearesShitstorm. That was as crass as ever but it was Lloyd’s way of talking about topics that get people in trouble today much like this movie had things to say about mainstream Hollywood movies compared to the can-do attitude of underground indie filmmakers.

I don’t want to sell the acting short in this movie either. There are the roles played by Debbie Rochon and Mario Diaz (who played D.J.), and, of course, Lloyd himself, that are there to be over-the-top and what have you. Then you have the incredible Will Keenan once again killing it as Casey. Alyce LaTourelle was as great as she was really appealing as Jennifer. Before the menu came up on the Blu-Ray, Trent Haaga talked about how he would have nothing if not for this movie and he’s so likable as Jerry in this. He’s had a long career since in indie horror.

Alright, next week, we wrap the entire Troma Month up with the most recent of the movies I chose for this whole theme. We also cross over into a little bit of musical too with 2006’s Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead. So be sure to come back here in seven days and don’t forget your 11 herbs and spices.