Out in the Japanese countryside in an isolated farmhouse, a scientist continues his work, seeking to save his daughter from the terrible affliction she has that will kill her should he fail in his endeavours. But his methods are unorthodox to say the least, turning the local villagers into zombies so they can gestate a form of parasite in their stomachs which he then feeds to his offspring - most would say no matter how much he loves his daughter, this is simply foolhardy. At the same time, a group of friends are making their way to the same area of woodland by a river for a trip, though one of them, Megumi (Arisa Nakamura), is there to forget...
There's nothing that will make you forget the one year anniversary of the suicide of a loved one more than an epic fart, would appear to be the message of Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead, which took the walking dead theme of many a cheapo horror flick and actually derived an original spin on it. Of course, it was only original because nobody else wanted to touch the concept, either that or it had never crossed the mind of even the most desperate Troma employee, but here we were with a zombie plot obsessed with bowel movements, and you could take it or leave it, with the vast majority of moviegoers choosing to leave it. This was assuredly not a mainstream effort, in case you were in any doubt.
But if you liked your movies extreme, then you might find something to amuse rather than appal, though it had to be pointed out this was a comedy and therefore not to be taken the slightest bit seriously. Was it funny, though? Was going to those lengths for a laugh a fruitful use of writer and director Noboru Iguchi's time, or was he merely making these works - he was a veteran of the extreme Japanese cinema movement by this stage - more or less for himself, and if anyone else liked it that was a bonus? Certainly he had picked up fans from across the globe, but you suspected they were laughing at him than with him, posing the single word query "Seriously?!" and then revelling in the bad taste.
Quite a lot of this came across as a parody, though precisely of what may have been so specialised that Iguchi was indeed the only one in on his jokes, you could get that making zombies animated by shit was supposed to be spoofy since nobody would regard that as a sincere escapade, but then he seemed to be sending up Japanese high school drama too, with all its sentimentalities and aching emotions. Our heroine was dressed in the stereotypical high school uniform throughout, which should have been a giveaway that he was not about to treat his contemporaries in, say, anime with the respect their fans perhaps thought they deserved, but then again, considering some of the stuff such characters were subjected to for titillation you wondered if Iguchi was not joining in with the piling on.
Certainly there was a lot here that made the characters the butt of the joke, pun definitely intended, as Megumi was accompanied by her best pal Aya (Mayu Sagano) who is trying to help her get over the suicide of her sister which she feels she could have prevented (er, yeah, hilarious we're sure), but also along was Maki (Asana Mamoru) who wants to be a supermodel and she thinks the best way to do so is to swallow a tapeworm found in the river, to make her skinny. The results of that may have been predictable (severe indigestion) but the rest of it was rather more difficult to anticipate, as on finding an outhouse, the band which also included Aya's boyfriend and an apparently random, older nerd find themselves under threat from those zombies, and eventually in a hentai manner those parasites. Either Iguchi was indulging his fetishes, or was a canny businessman indulging others' fetishes, but in his cheapo manner (the effects are less than convincing) you had to admit it had a singular vision on the benefits of breaking wind for a narrow market share. Music by Yasuhiko Fukuda.
