The Taint
**The following review contains coarse language and some spoilers that might be offensive to readers. Read at your own peril.**
You can see thousands of movies as I have, and yet I can guarantee that you’ve never seen anything quite like “The Taint.” It’s somewhat fitting that I’m finally getting to watch it after just having seen the absurd and painfully unfunny sex-and-swords farce “Your Highness”; this indie by Drew Bolduc and Dan Nelson deals with even more depravity and disturbing sexual subject matter than that film does, and it does so in a way that should truly make the filmmakers behind that film ashamed of themselves. This is not a film for the faint of heart; it pushes right up to the limits of what would be acceptable in a non-pornographic film and dances along that edge with reckless abandon. This is a positive review, by the way.
The film begins with a cliche: a young man (Phil, played by Bolduc) who has just finished sleeping with a farmer’s daughter. He is chased off shortly after by said farmer, who has a crazier than usual look in his eye (as well as an unsettling amount of poop in his pants). It’s going around; it turns out that the water has become tainted with a chemical that turns men into zombies with raging erections and an appetite for female violence. As he’s running, Phil is saved by Misandra (Colleen Walsh), whose husband was infected by the water. Together, the two try and survive all manner of difficulties as they attempt to get to a well that has untainted water.
Those first two paragraphs should tell you immediately whether you can handle this film; I’m guessing most people wouldn’t be able to. As I was watching the film I was reminded of a film I saw a couple of years ago titled “One Eyed Monster,” a horror comedy about a possessed penis that starred Ron Jeremy and, in a small role, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s” Amber Benson (whose involvement was the reason I saw the film in the first place). It was an entertaining little film, but “The Taint” is better. This film (scripted by Bolduc) takes what would be a central conceit of a pornographic spoof and turns it into something a bit more unsettling and satirical; through flashback we see a couple of scientists who are working on a drug that would make a man’s dick irresistible to the opposite sex– they are the ones who are ultimately responsible for the taint and the violence around our protagonists. The film is reprehensible in its violence towards women, but that’s the point Bolduc and Nelson are making– in our lust for sexual fulfillment, mankind (by which I mean cock-swinging males here) will ultimately resort to actions that degrade females and can lead to violence if we don’t find ourselves satisfied. The film sometimes has difficulty in moving between horror and comedy (some of the performances are a bit too over-the-top), but the fact that the filmmakers tried at all, let alone succeeded as much as they did, is quite an accomplishment considering the subject matter. This is not an easy film to watch (if I could compare it to one film in terms of its impact, I would liken it to Pasolini’s notorious “Salo”) but it manages to achieve a surprising level of intelligence and social commentary if you can get past all the misogyny and gratuitous content (both sexual and violent).
