Bad Milo (2013)
When it comes to good plopcorn movies it’s hard to go wrong with a creature feature. One of those movies where the prime antagonist is a rubberised monster that you only get hints of for the first act of the movie. Bad Milo does not disappoint.
For example (and a good one it is..) take Gremlins. We’re introduced to the little mogwai Gizmo early on with the premise that he shouldn’t get it wet, expose it to sunlight or let it eat after midnight… you all know how it ends but for that first 20 minutes of the film whilst everything is set up and you get emotionally attached to the characters before it starts to go wrong.
Now Gremlins is in no way a Plopcorn movie… we have fond memories of queueing at the cinema (whilst under age) to blag our way in and loving every minute of it. It’s a great creature feature and one that has become a classic.
Bad Milo is another of these creature features but although it’s funny, has some great moments and has a great premise, we don’t think that you could ever class it as a classic. To be a classic you need to have exposure, have critics talking about you and sadly Bad Milo didn’t get any of these. In fact it flew so far under the radar that it may well have been subterranean.
It’s odd too, though well produced, funny and showcasing a cast that you’ve seen somewhere but just can’t place. It’s a shame that it barely made $100,000 at the box office and perhaps if it had been released under a fan-fare of publicity it would have done better.
The story is simple enough, Duncan is an over worked and over-stressed accountant at National Investment Group. His boss is a douche who dumps on him constantly and this is giving Duncan stress induced stomach pains.
On top of this, he has daddy issues not only from his absent father but also from his mother and her new young lover, and his wife who is desperate for him to start giving her the child she desperately wants.
Poor old Duncan however is bottling this all up and when we meet him he’s in the hospital having an ultrasound scan and the doctor offering to cut off part of his colon with an electrified wire cutter – not a pleasant thought as you can well imagine.
In an effort to manage his stress and colon problems (and I don’t mean punctuation) he goes to see Dr Oliver Highsmith, a psycho-anal-yst (yep that was done on purpose) who tries to talk Duncan into being hypnotised. Duncan however is sceptical and decides that therapy probably isn’t for him.
That night, after a particularly stressful dinner at his mother’s house, where the conversation turns to children, Duncan feels put on again and in an effort to deflect attention away from him and his wife, he asks his mother’s new young partner whether they were planning on having children as a joke and Bobbi pipes up with the brilliant line, “Not the way we do it.” Too much information for Duncan to take.
There’s also Dr Tipp a fertility doctor at the meal who goes overboard in trying to get Duncan to talk about his sexual problems. This builds up nicely to an overload of stress that he just can’t take when he gets home we get our ‘birth’ scene with ‘Milo’ bursting forth from Duncan’s ass in a manner that anyone who has had a teeth-clencher of a poo will be familiar with.
Whilst reading the press junket for the film, the director let Ken Marino (Duncan) loose and he really delivers a sense of anguish and pain that only someone who has been through this kind of girthy experience can know. Duncan thankfully passes out on the floor after his traumatic experience, leaving Milo to run off and cause mischief.
Milo, the ass demon, looks the part with his little rubber body and bulbous black eyes. We particularly liked the sharp little jagged teeth set in its grubby little maw and there is a look of pure malevolence in his face as he runs off to kill anything that is the cause of Duncan’s stress-induced life.
His first victim is Duncan’s ‘cubie’ – the irritating git that he has to share his office space with. The said office space is a disused toilet as the boss has moved him out of his corner office and into a p-flush new space (see what we did there?). Milo rushes off to find Alistair who has just deleted all the work that Duncan had done over the last year. Once done, Milo returns to his home inside Duncan’s ass-cave as if nothing has changed.
The next day Duncan goes back to see his therapist and is convinced to have hypnotherapy where he regresses and talks about ass monsters, without batting an eyelid Dr Yaegar believes him and finds the obligatory ‘dusty tome of knowledge’ that such films often have to recount the myths of the anus, replete with imagery showing a monster coming out of a man’s arse.
From here on in the story is predictable but still funny. The metaphor of having to deal with your inner demons in an effort to make yourself a better person and confront those things that have made you unhappy comes to the fore with Duncan trying to befriend Milo. It doesn’t all go to plan as you would expect but the scene where he wants Milo to climb back into his ass is particularly funny.
The film does come to its finale exactly how you would expect it to. Dealing with the issue of his estranged father, coping with the fact he’s now going to be a father himself and his boss trying to frame him for embezzlement seems a natural progression for the storyline and the scenes where Milo and Duncan are cuddled up on the sofa bring a kind of sweet, sentimental humour to counterpoint the grosser parts of the film.
Typically with these films we find out the reason Duncan’s dad has become a bit of a hippy and abandoned them is the same reason that Duncan leaves Sarah, he too has his own butt-badger and this sets us up for the final few scenes where Milo and Ralph fight before Milo heads off to try and kill Sarah, the cause of Duncan’s latest bout of stress.
Overall Bad Milo is definitely worth a watch; it’s gross, funny, has likeable characters and an over the top plot… all good things in a Plopcorn movie.
We’d give it a steady 
out of 10 plops and now we’re going to use your bathroom… and we’re not gonna clean it up afterwards.
Oh and whilst trawling t’internet for images I came across this… I wonder who would win??
