If there’s anyone who can pull off one of the dumbest sounding premises for a movie character crisis in years, it’s Ken Marino. You may recognize him from The State, or maybe Party Down, or Childrens Hospital, or perhaps his phenomenal Bachelor-spoofying web series Burning Love. He’s certainly one of a kind, maybe in the way Danny McBride is one of a kind. His characters are routinely fairly repulsive but beneath the oblivious bravado there’s something you can sympathize with.
Bad Milo! is equally one of a kind, so it’s fitting that an actor like Marino is the one who makes it somehow, inexplicably, work. It comes from the mind of new writer-director Jacob Vaughan, who has worked on some of the Duplass Brothers’ projects as an assistant editor (Mark Duplass, as an executive producer of this movie, has been pushing it heavily).
The premise is that Ken Marino plays a guy whose life is stressing him out to the point where he is suffering from severe gastrointestinal issues, only to discover that the source of his physical pain is a small alien/demon thing that emerges from his backside and carries out his worst, most violent impulses. I can’t emphasize enough that this is entirely as weird as it sounds, maybe more so. But somehow Vaughan and company weave together earnest psychological elements into their absurd horror comedy that I ended up really liking it. If you’re looking for a retro-feeling comedy about a dude with some critter living up his ass, I can’t think of a better choice than Bad Milo!
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