I write about movies for my own personal amusement.

January 13, 2017

Movie Review- Bad Milo! (2013)

Originally written Feb 23, 2014

Bad Milo!- the story of a movie that promised little and gave nothing. When you have a ludicrous premise for a movie, it’s an uphill battle trying to get people to take you seriously. Most of the time, filmmakers go for the “Might as well have fun with this” approach and let the weirdness run wild. But the guys behind Bad Milo! decided to take on the Sisyphean task of making a dramedy about a colon-demon and then were promptly squished by their figurative boulder.

In case you were unaware, Bad Milo! is a movie about a guy with a carnivorous demon living in his intestines. The premise sounds good(ish) on paper, but somehow the writers royally screwed it up. The first 15 minutes or so of the movie had potential, but the story completely shifts gears after that and everything goes down from there.

The main character, Duncan, goes to see a therapist after having nightmare visions of Milo. The therapist is a generic hippie guy played by the woodchipper guy from Fargo, who tells him that he has some sort of ancient demon living in his guts. The therapist tells Duncan that he needs to come to terms with Milo, and then he’ll go away. (Get it? Dealing with personal demons, except it’s an actual demon! Hilarious!)

What follows is what can only be described as a weird indie dramedy with ass-monsters. Duncan decides to make amends with his estranged father, but apparently his dad has a colon-monster too. The movie is pretty much a blur of sappy father/son bonding stuff, with the occasional rubbery puppet popping up to break the monotony. But even then the stuff with Milo isn’t that interesting. There’s a whole realm of silly possibilities to explore in an colon-demon movie, and the potential is never tapped into.

For what’s supposed to be a horror-comedy, there’s not much humor either. There’s a brief bit about how Milo’s killings have been blamed on a rabid raccoon, and that’s about as funny as it gets. The rest is just poor attempts at gross-out humor. There’s a certain line that has to be crossed before something becomes so gross it’s funny, but Bad Milo! constantly falls short of that line.


Overall, this is a weird and lame movie. I’m not sure what the writers were going for, and it doesn’t seem like they knew either. The movie has two modes- gross and melodrama. The shifts between the two are really distracting and make the movie drag like crazy. Bad Milo! barely clocks in at 80 minutes,but it feels considerably longer than that. This is a movie about a butt-monster for crying out loud, it should at least be entertainingly bad. Unfortunately all we got was a boring and confusing concoction of a movie.

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