The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man review: what can man do against such reckless shit

Back in 2018, high-ranking Brisbane executive Andrew Macintosh was arrested after being caught on camera defecating in public (toilet paper in hand) and fleeing the scene. The people were quick to dub him with a situational nickname: ‘The Poo Jogger’. But he may as well have been called ‘The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man’.

Journalists quickly realised that Macintosh was not the first to engage in this filthy habit. In 2017, two near-identical cases came out of the US: ‘The Mad Pooper’, and simply ‘The Pooper’. Then, in 2019, a Toronto man was caught throwing whole buckets of liquified faeces onto university students, and the ‘Pee Pee Poo Poo Man‘ was born.

Speaking to The Sydney Morning Herald, clinical psychologist Grant Brecht attempted to analyse the tricky turd trend: ‘They are seeking a thrill and they get addicted to the way it makes them feel … equating it to taking a hit of heroin,’ he said.

Braden Sitter Sr.’s lo-fi, guerilla film The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man takes the analysis further, by playing out a fictional scenario in which a Canadian man named Miguel is telepathically contacted by the CIA to carry out his faecal matter mission.

Watch the trailer for The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man:

The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man: funny, weird, shitty

This is a film that’d be all too easy to describe as ‘shitty’. As Miguel descends further into isolated madness, likening himself to a god and contacting government agencies with hallucinated information, no resident of Toronto is safe from his Poo Poo or his Pee Pee. In the great tradition of films with scatalogical scenes (see John Water’s Pink Flamingos, or Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò/120 Days of Sodom), this film is not trying to be polite about poop.

Shot like a lo-fi documentary, The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man discovers a balance between ‘truthful’ cinema and bizarro, Tommy Wiseau-style surrealism. It’s funny, it’s weird, and it’s often just plain bad. But I guess that’s on me for expecting that a film called The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man could be good.

Story wise, it really hasn’t got a lot going for it, but it has its moments of charm and laugh-out-loud gags. When Miguel is introduced, we see him masturbating to VR porn of a CG dinosaur performing a blow job. There’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.

Once the poop-throwing starts, it never stops, and this becomes the main bulk of the film. The repetition of the crime had a strange effect on me, where I started out dry-retching but ended up giggling uncontrollably as each victim met their stinky fate. This effect was helped along by the handful of songs that play throughout the movie that are all poo-themed parodies of hits like Nirvana’s Something In The Way (‘Something In My Ass’), The Pixies’ Here Comes Your Man (‘Here Comes Your Shit’), and CCR’s Fortunate Son (‘Poo Poo Pee’).

Poopsploitation

Spliced among the scenes of shit are vignettes of anonymous couples breaking up, friends arguing, and people having uncomfortable conversations. This bold choice increases the feeling of tension and unease throughout the film, and hints at a core thesis of seeing society as a judgemental, angry place.

As a character, Miguel (played by Rishi Rodriguez in his first film role) isn’t some outlandish villain, he’s just a lonely dude whose social isolation has made him particularly vulnerable to suggestion. All it takes is a bad acid trip, a lost job and a lack of company to mould him into the eponymous Pee Pee Poo Poo Man. I felt a strange empathy for him – the Travis Bickle of poop-throwing – and a profound sadness that welled up among all the muck.

It’s barely more than a gross-out endurance test, but The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man may go down in history as the catalyst of the poopsploitation movement.

The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man screens tomorrow night at the Sydney Underground Film Festival.

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