The funniest thing about Todd Rohal’s “Fuck My Son!” — alas, one of the only funny things about this impressively sick but tiresomely self-amused celebration of bad taste — is that the most controversial aspect of the movie isn’t its title, or its demented story about a gun-packing mother who forces a random woman to have sex with her monstrous son (imagine if the Sarlaac from “Star Wars” had a baby with the alien from “Mac and Me,” nipples and boils everywhere, diaper oozing wet shit, just a gaping hole full of hotdogs where his dick should be), or even how brutally it treats the sex slave’s elementary school-age daughter, Belinda, who will be cooked in an oven if her mom doesn’t comply with their captor’s demands).

No, the most controversial aspect of “Fuck My Son!” is that it uses some very crude and obvious AI for what amounts to roughly 90 seconds of screen time. A number of festival viewers were outraged. I guess some things are just too obscene for audiences to stomach.

Like everything else in Rohal’s film, the AI-afflicted scenes are designed to triple-underline their own grotesqueness. A prologue modeled after an AMC theater pre-show (“No jacking off in the theater,” “Do not pee or crap in your seat,” “Our restrooms are now closed”) is filled out with inhuman crowds, while the characters from Bernice’s favorite show — a “Veggietales”-esque abomination called “The Meatie Mates” — pop up throughout the movie in increasingly artificial form, their every appearance better reflecting the ghoulish slop that today’s children eagerly consume on YouTube. 

As in Radu Jude’s recent “Dracula,” the technology isn’t used as a shortcut (if anything, incorporating AI made Rohal’s work considerably more difficult), but rather as a commentary on the soullessness of modern “art.” Reactive to a world in which people have become more offended by form than content, “Fuck My Son!” exists to explore the efficacy of shock value at a time when image-making itself has become so repulsive and society has ingested its own memetic sickliness as a sign of the future. 

Rohal wants to push back against the numbing dystopia of Project 2025, so he’s cooked up a collective experience — one that will tour across the country, advertising its lack of streaming availability as its greatest hook — designed to startle us back to our senses and restore the sheer joy of transgression. Little other joy is on offer (either within this movie, or outside of it), but “Fuck My Son!” feels like it was only made to indulge in the fact that it still could be.

So while I may not have particularly enjoyed the experience of watching it, I have no choice but to admit that it does, indeed, exist. Critics are raving “This is a real thing that people made.” Put it on the poster. 

Of course, this material didn’t originate with Rohal; an idea as pure and profound as “Fuck My Son!” has to come from somewhere. Usually it’s from a divine vision or the liquid meth they sell at the front of America’s finest gas stations. In this case, it came from a graphic novel: Johnny Ryan’s “Fuck My Son: A Tale of Terror, Issue One,” which Rohal has faithfully adapted like a sacred text. And that’s just as well, because the movie has no interest in making such intellectual property more palatable to a wider audience.

Either you want to see a movie called “Fuck My Son!” or you don’t (“It’s just garbage,” the director has said. “It’s made by trashmen for trashmen”), and Rohal’s film is squarely targeted at the people who might conceivably pay for a ticket; the aforementioned pre-show offers viewers the choice of “Perv-o-Vision” glasses that make all of the characters naked, or a “Nude Blok” edition for those who pray to “fill their lives with blissful ignorance and intolerance” (the film’s spirit all but requires comparisons to John Waters, even if its execution cleaves a lot closer to early James Gunn). 

The world of “Fuck My Son!” is a small and seedy place where every mote of innocence only exists as an invitation for perversion, or worse. We first meet Sandi (Tipper Newton, recalling Sarah Silverman in her ability to conflate innocence with repulsion) as she takes little Bernice (Kynzie Colmery) dress shopping, where — of course — a peeper is spying on all of the dressing rooms. Shot like an ’80s Z-picture but always self-indulgent enough to make clear that it’s in on the joke, the movie soon introduces its leading ladies to an overbearing mother (a Chris Farley-esque Robert Longstreet, growling in drag) who’s fallen and can’t get up. 

But it’s a trap! The mother lures Sandi and Bernice to her van, knocks them out, and takes them to the remote farmhouse where she lives with her mutant son Fabian (Steve Little). There’s so much sex in the world, and she can’t stand the thought that her sweet child will never get to have any of it. The mother wheels Fabian in, places Bernice nearby with a front-row view, and — wait for it — demands that Sandi fuck her son. Bareback. “Person to Person” star George Sample III eventually shows up to round out the cast, but that’s really about all there is to it. As positioned to Sandi, the terms couldn’t be simpler: “The sooner you fuck my son, the sooner I’ll let your daughter out of the oven.” What’s a mother to do? 

Rohal pays lip-service to the idea that parents will do anything for their children, but this movie is much less interested in developing its themes than it is in watching Sandi fish around Fabian’s innards for his Lovecraftian penis (spoiler alert: she finds it, and the massive appendage becomes a veritable character in its own right). Is it gross? Very.

But the grossness doesn’t scale at a particularly engaging rate, and while Rohal’s agenda required a certain amount of cheekiness to validate the fun of its own shock value, it’s hard to overlook the reality that “Fuck My Son!” is far less disturbing than the movie promised by its title. For all of its eldritch horrors (Fabian’s penis eventually penetrates almost everything you can imagine, with child rape being the most obvious red line that Rohal won’t cross), this heightened story is too “fun” to be even half as fucked up as the things we read in the headlines every day, and not funny enough for its increasingly whacked out “WTF”-ness to be enjoyable on its own terms. Things get wild because they can, and then slaphappy because they can’t be anything else.

When a title card pops up that reads: “The Ending: Part I,” the joke is that a movie with so little substance would require something as pompous as a multi-tiered epilogue. 

What meaning there is behind “Fuck My Son!” is easy enough to understand: Enjoy this kind of garbage while you can, because it won’t be long before late night TV hosts are locked in jail, Donald Trump starts talking about Eddington as if it were a real town he saw on Fox News, and everyone who saw “One Battle After Another” is labeled as a card-carrying member of Antifa (the “A” in “AMC A-List” stands for “Anarchy”). Appreciate when slop could still be a display of defiance instead, and not just the visual language of cultural defeat. See “Fuck My Son!” not because it’s good, but rather because it refuses to pretend that it isn’t bad. If only that argument were enough to convince me that it shouldn’t have been better.

Grade: C-

“Fuck My Son!” opens at the IFC Center in New York City on Thursday, October 16, before traveling to other theaters around the country. Its full touring schedule can be found here.

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RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) — In this episode of 8News Reel Talk, digital producers Tannock Blair and Julia Broberg returned to the WRIC NOW studio to discuss the latest entry in Disney’s “Tron” franchise.

Directed by Joachim Rønning and starring both Jared Leto and Greta Lee, “Tron: Ares” was released on Friday, Oct. 10.

The hosts gave their reviews and assigned the following star ratings:

Tannock: ★★☆☆☆

Julia: ★★☆☆☆

To watch more livestreams and digital video content, head to the WRIC NOW page. You can also watch full on-demand videos on your smart TV using the WRIC+ app.

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