SEPTIC MAN Review

Release Date: August 15, 2014 (Limited)
Currently Available on VOD Platforms
Director: Jesse Thomas Cook
MPAA Rating: R

Septic Man is a shitty movie in every sense of the word.  It’s a film heavily centered around shit and, other than the high quality and extremely gross gore effects, it’s not a very well made movie either.   The threadbare plot seems to only exist at all in order to transition from one gross-out moment to the next and the characters are underdeveloped and generic.  In many ways it feels like a higher quality Troma film, which could be viewed as a compliment, depending on how disgusting you like your horror.

The film revolves around a septic man, played by Jason David Brown, who gets hired by a mysterious consortium (led by the always creepy Julian Richings) to discover the cause of a town’s tainted water supply.  The people in this quite little suburb are coming down with some crazy and horrific diseases and it’s up to the septic man to solve the problem.  Why they would only choose one man and not bring in the CDC, I don’t know, but that’s just the first in a long line of puzzling questions this movie raises.

Because he has a pregnant wife and wants to provide a better life for them, the septic man, Jack, agrees to help and heads into the sewer while the rest of the town is evacuated.  Jack quickly finds the cause of the problem, however he gets trapped within a giant tank filled with the worst stuff one could imagine in the process.  His exposure to this mixture of all manner diseases and bodily fluids become the catalyst for a biological change in Jack that may change him forever.

Viewers with weak stomachs should be very cautious when going into Septic Man.  Although it’s not the grossest movie I’ve ever seen (that honor still goes to Wetlands), it’s filled to the brim with shit, vomit, blood, and any other type of nastiness one can think of.  Unfortunately, a lot of this content feels forced and serves no purpose other than to nauseate the audience, which very well may be the goal of director Jesse Thomas Cook.

There’s just not enough plot or character here to reinforce these terribly disgusting moments.  Jack is bland and uninteresting and the villains of the film are equally generic.  I generally like movies that are contained in one location with the lead trapped in an undesirable setting, which initially brought me to this film in the first place.  The plot of the movie feels so cobbled together however, that everything felt forced and nonsensical.

For gorehounds looking for an entertaining gross-out movie, Septic Man does deliver.  Nearly every scene will make you squirm but in the end it just feels like the director is daring you to keep watching.  The effects work is solid and proves to be the best part of the film, but the weak plot and characters prevent this from being anything more than a semi-entertaining shit-fest.