

Bad Milo, out now on VOD, is a feel-good, body horror comedy. It sounds like something that shouldn't exist, but it's utterly marvelous, with great comedy performances and grossout effects. The weirdest part? This is an emotionally moving film about a butt demon.

Writer/director Jacob Vaughan has created a movie that is the ultimate genre mashup, and the amazing thing is that it works.

Bad Milo centers on Duncan (Ken Marino, in a great performance), whose life has come to an impasse. His creepy boss (Patrick Warburton, the Tick!) is forcing him to fire people and embezzle money from the employee retirement fund. His wife, Sarah (Community's Gillian Jacobs), is pushing him to get pregnant. And his parents are both kind of nuts. So it's no surprise that all this stress has given him horrible intestinal difficulties.


The thing is, he doesn't just have a polyp in his colon, as the doctor suspects. He's got a butt demon. And whenever he gets mad, it claws its way out of his ass and murders someone. There are some seriously bizarre and wrong death scenes, which would be gross if they weren't so slapstick. I wish I could spoil them for you, just to have the joy of making jokes about asses and dicks that deeply satisfy my inner 13-year-old. But I'll spare you! I want you to watch this movie and see the wonder for yourself.

Duncan, good guy that he is, just wants to fix things. So he reluctantly visits a hypnotherapist who identifies the true nature of his butt demon, and encourages him to make peace with it. These scenes, along with many others in the film, will remind David Cronenberg fans of the movie The Brood – you know, the one where an evil therapist encourages a lady to "give birth to her rage" and she squirts out a bunch of deformed babies that kill people for her. Bad Milo is clearly an homage to this earlier film, though played for laughs rather than pure horror.

You can probably guess the basic plot outline of the film, as Duncan struggles with his inner demon, which he nicknames Milo. What's surprising is how psychologically truthful the movie winds up being. Duncan begins to figure out what spawned Milo, which leads him to confront his absentee hippie father. These scenes are goofy and fantastical, but they're also a melancholy look at how people justify being emotionally unavailable to their children.

If you're one of those odd people who likes body horror, toilet humor, and sarcastic comedy, this movie will be a revelation. You'll be choked up by the end, and not just because of all the poop and the stabbing. I cannot recommend this weird little indie enough.

Bad Milo is out now on VOD. Watch it this weekend!