An indie horror/comedy playing tonight at the 12th annual Tromadance Film Festival and being self-distributed by its creators, THE TAINT is exactly what happens when smart filmmakers intentionally make a stupid movie. Some microbudget films are too clever by half, and even more are nowhere near as smart as they think they are, but THE TAINT gleefully embraces the freedom to be unmitigated trash.

The story centers on a tainted water supply causing men to brutally kill all women in sight…but that makes the film sound shocking. THE TAINT would be shocking, if it weren’t utterly goofy. The first shot appears to be a view looking out from inside a vagina, followed quickly by multiple pairs of anonymous bare breasts, and the sound of a woman screaming over the image of a bloody penetration. Before you consider the possibility of this review misinterpreting a bold attempt at confrontational art, less than a minute later the protagonist is being chased by a would-be castrator wielding a scythe and crapping his union underwear, complete with graphic close-up. The makers of THE TAINT committed themselves to be as tasteless and viciously violent as their limited resources would allow, but then applied an irreverent tone to the material that transforms unspeakable ugliness into humorous commentary. Its a movie “about misogyny” that’s so blithely upbeat you’d wonder if anybody knew it could be offensive, except for those constant sly indicators that everybody on board was smart enough to know better.

That’s not to say the movie is poorly made; THE TAINT is full of undeniably impressive no-budget ingenuity. The directors are Virginia-based underground filmmaker Drew Bolduc and VCU graduate Dan Nelson, and though their approach sometimes lacks finesse (the movie is dominated by bright daylight exteriors in locations that will be recognizable to most Richmond, VA residents), their combined skills make for an uncommonly assured first feature. It’s also cheerfully, gloriously dumb, following slack-jawed ne’er-do-well Phil (played by Bolduc) through a story saturated with gushing bodily fluids of every kind. Phil helplessly watches as infected misogynists smash women’s heads in, graphically, while their exposed penises gush semen, graphically.

We also get vomit, the aforementioned excrement, blood-spurting wounds, disembowelings and not one but two scenes in which a man’s face is torn off his skull, both times hilariously (the first for its suddenness, the second for the victim’s temporary solution to his facelessness). Then there’s a sex scene shot from inside the receiving orifice, endless homophobic slurs and a coat-hanger abortion that occurs offscreen but is vividly represented by gag-inducing sound FX. The copy on the DVD packaging promises more exploding penises than any other movie ever—a claim there is no reason to refute.

If any of the above sounds enticing, you will likely laugh throughout THE TAINT. The percussive editing times all the shocks and horror for comedy, like a hysterically funny scene in which Phil is viciously beaten; nothing on screen is humorous on an intellectual level, but somehow the utter brutality is hilarious. The movie is so over-the-top that the low-key jokes are the ones that catch you off-guard. Mixed somewhere into THE TAINT is a flirtation with larger themes, including vague condemnations of alcoholism, the inherent homoeroticism of intense athletes, the cycle of abuse, indoctrinating propaganda and an animated movie-within-the-movie that seems to simultaneously decry animal testing and emotionally manipulative cartoons. THE TAINT ultimately makes no grand statement on misogyny, but the final shot approaches a kind of brilliance in suggesting that a society which glorifies violence against women is doomed to one big bummer of a sausage party. Did we mention that this shot features dozens of swirling, disembodied penises?

Then there’s all the bad acting—except while most bad amateur-movie acting is painfully embarrassing, in THE TAINT it feels like part of the joke. It helps that the actors rarely seem to be in on that joke, thankfully bucking the unfortunate trend of young filmmakers encouraging their casts to clown. Phil’s constant slow-on-the-uptake pauses always end in an unexpected deadpan (an awkward silence about a distant well ends with a perfectly timed “I just really don’t want to have to drink my own piss”). A scene in which a woman weeps hysterically while holding the infected brain of her dead husband simply could not have been funnier. A nuance-free reading completely sells the line “There’s no society anymore. Gang rape’s OK now!” It’s all pretty arch, but performed with a straight face.

Even with gutter-level aspirations, THE TAINT doesn’t completely succeed. The plot gets overexplained without ever kicking into high gear, and we spend way too much time in dialogue scenes with characters who just aren’t interesting past the initial joke. Other scenes feel like the filmmakers first assembled any women they knew who would take their clothes off on camera, then tried to figure out how to incorporate nudity into the film (early on, a screaming chase victim is suddenly topless, and the viewer’s question is not why it happened, but how). While no one could accuse the filmmakers of not going far enough, you do occasionally wished they had dreamed bigger. The trailer for THE TAINT promises a barrage of constant carnage, but unfortunately includes every single money shot from the film back to back, so enticed viewers will be left waiting for and wanting more of them.

That does speak to the power of those money shots, though; the makeup FX are sometimes amateurish, but the digital FX by co-director Nelson blend them so seamlessly into certain shots that a couple of scenes will make your eyes pop. Death blows by saw and car door provide some of the best “Holy shit!” movie kills in years, regardless of budget. Another split-second digital render, showing a street-level view of a 747 crashing into a building, is flat-out terrifying. Even without considering the production limitations, moments like that are no small achievement, and handily won THE TAINT Best Special FX at 2010’s Dark Carnival Film Festival.

Warts and all, THE TAINT will be a blast for the midnight-movie crowd, and is perfectly suited to Tromadance. The www.taintmovie.com website offers the film for purchase as a reasonably priced HD Download, SD download, DVD or the achingly nerd-baiting limited-edition VHS. The disc and downloads come complete with a lackadaisical director’s commentary in which Bolduc and Nelson answer off-mic questions and laugh with their friends on the crew. They share behind-the-scenes anecdotes with dry-humored candor, occasionally sheepish modesty and a refreshingly casual attitude toward filmmaking. Neither of them wastes a single second defending the content of the film; THE TAINT speaks for itself, proving Bolduc, Nelson and company to be inventive, adventurous and unapologetic filmmakers willing to go for broke for a dumb, gross joke. Someone should let them loose with an actual budget and see what nauseating depths they could plumb with it.

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