FUCK MY SON! is a movie that, for the foreseeable future, you’re only gonna see if it comes to your town as part of a road show. Writer/director Todd Rohal (THE GUATEMALAN HANDSHAKE, THE CATECHISM CATACLYSM) is traveling around with a 35mm print that hit Seattle last weekend and has many more stops lined up.
Rohal says he plans to do that for at least a year, and that he’ll never license it to streaming, though eventually it will come to physical media. But it’s the kind of thing that if you’re gonna have a great time it’s probly gonna be in a midnight movie (for me 8pm) type scenario laughing, cringing and groaning together with other area weirdos. Did I mention it’s called FUCK MY SON!?
It’s based on a comic book by Johnny Ryan (Looney Tunes Cartoons, Who Raped My Horse?), and this screening started with a puppet show based on another Ryan comic, followed by a discussion between Ryan and fellow alternative comix legend Peter Bagge. The former was grossed out by the fake poop left on the ground by the puppeteers and made Rohal clean it up.
They weren’t only there to talk about the movie – Rohal moderated and seemed to want to pick their brains about their previous brushes with potential Hollywood adapters and their feelings about trying to make transgressive art despite today’s sensitivities and social media outrages. I was sympathetic to their points while also sensing they were headed toward the corner of Gen-X Old Man and Everything Has to Be So P.C. These Days. Bagge told a story about R. Crumb saying he was afraid to make comics after #MeToo, meaning it as a sad story about self censorship, but also making me think, “Hmmm…” Thankfully I’m pretty sure nobody said the buzzwords “woke” or “cancel culture,” and Ryan said something pretty astute about how accusing everybody who tries to be edgy of being an “edgelord” is ultimately asking for no edges.
Anyway he had a comic called Fuck My Son which has been turned into the movie FUCK MY SON!. He said he imagined the comic as an exploitation movie that would never actually be made, but now (to his disbelief) it has been. It proudly bears an old school X-rating, along with a Universal logo and a “Hormel Chili Presents” credit (possibly my favorite joke in the whole thing). It’s the story of an old lady named Vermina (she reminds me of a heavyset version of Mama from Mama’s Family) who abducts a woman named Sandi (Tipper Newton, HANNAH TAKES THE STAIRS) and her young daughter Bernice (Kynzie Colmery, SCARED TO DEATH), puts the daughter in a cage, and threatens them with violence unless, yes, the mother agrees to fuck her son, her sweet angel, Fabian.
When Sandi eventually gives in Vermina wheels out Fabian and he’s a repulsive, pustule-ridden mutant. To get his dick out she has to remove his diaper and reach into a weird hole. There’s some Frank Henenlotter spirit in this, and actually now that I check IMDb I see that Gabe Bartalos (BASKET CASE 2 and 3, director of SKINNED DEEP) did work in the makeup department. But according to the opening credits the creature FX supervisor was Robert Kurtzman, the K in KNB whose resume includes EVIL DEAD II, A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 5, PULP FICTION and story credit for FROM DUSK TILL DAWN. In the Q&A Rohal proudly noted that Kurtzman made the fake dicks for BOOGIE NIGHTS and The Curse and now this. If you’re like me you’ll admire the craftsmanship done in the service of absolutely repelling shock humor. Being repulsed by it is a fun group activity – the guy next to me seemed to like it but couldn’t stop saying things like “Oh please God no” as things escalated.
It’s a fucked up movie, and the score by Aaron M. Fernandez Olson (NUTCRACKERS) occasionally helps it almost pass for some deranged grindhouse thriller, but it’s not actually disturbing. It’s much too joyously button-pushing and playfully disgusting for that – like a drive-in remake of NOTHING BUT TROUBLE, with splashes of THE DARK BACKWARD and GARBAGE PAIL KIDS: THE MOVIE. A raunchy live action cartoon, some mischievous fun, that’s all.
The one aspect I found authentically unsavory is that there were several things I suspected were done with generative A.I. – some quick crowd shots in a funny pre-show, the gross meat-based lettering on the credits, an illustration at some point, but most significantly the scenes where Bernice imagines her favorite cartoon characters, anthropomorphized meats called The Meatie Mates, appearing to her as three-dimensional characters. I wanted to give Rohal the benefit of the doubt that maybe they were just janky and unpleasant animation, since I’ve seen artists falsely accused of being A.I. and I would hate to do that to somebody. Nobody brought it up during the Q&A, but Rohal did say something like “someone should make a 100% A.I. movie and piss everybody off,” and his friend and collaborator Megan Griffiths (director of EDEN) plugged an upcoming panel discussion where he said they would debate the use of A.I. The way he joked about it did make him kinda seem, sorry to say, like an edgelord. Like Sid Vicious wearing a swastika t-shirt to get a reaction.
I didn’t know this had already been a controversy, with Rohal’s side explained in this sympathetic Indiewire piece. I am not the angry people described in the article, because I feel bad even bringing this up, knowing it will be a dealbreaker for some people. I am one of the people described as not getting the joke – of course the Meatie Mates cartoon is a parody of kiddy slop, but it didn’t occur to me that the FX used to show them in the real world would be too. Is there a creepily realistic CGI Veggie Tales I’m unaware of?
Rohal honestly seems like a cool guy, and I’m a fan of his work, so I’m being more forgiving here than I’ve ever been with any other A.I. person. I think the explanation of his intent is sincere, and I can understand his other justification that it’s just another tool to make weird shit with. His defense that it’s not stealing jobs may also be true, if there was no chance he was going to hire animators or puppeteers to do those scenes, which is believable on such a DIY movie.
To me it’s still not worth it to use a technology that financially benefits the actual specific fascists and corrupt oligarchs currently at war with our democracies, ravaging the planet with their data centers, causing multiple environmental and health crises that they’re trying to hide away in minority communities, since that’s the way these fuckers operate. I don’t buy the argument that A.I. is inevitable so we might as well use it, which is also pretty much the last talking point for all the garbagey A.I.-soiled products they’ll keep forcing on us until the economy collapses from the dipshits in charge finally admitting that obvious charlatans got them to invest untold billions into an absurd scam. You really don’t even have to get to the part where generative A.I. steals the work of unwitting artists (myself included in the text-based ones) and has an output that usually looks putrid and is the preferred aesthetic of fascists. But there’s that too.
Even viewers that don’t see A.I. as an ethical breach or an insult to humanity don’t have a choice but to compare those parts to the lovingly hand-crafted aspects of the same film and wish that the very funny idea of the cartoon meat could’ve been done as puppets by Kurtzman and friends or animated by any of the talented artists associated with this comic book based production. Or maybe that would ruin the joke that I didn’t get. I don’t know.
After the movie I debated with myself about the possible intent of using it, and though I do definitely believe Rohal is coming from a more genuine place than those other assholes, it doesn’t change that yep, he used it, it’s in the movie. It’s like how they killed that turtle for real in CANNIBAL FEROX. Okay, I saw it, it was disgusting, then I went on with my life, but I don’t like that they did that. I hope nobody does that again. That’s all I can do.
(It’s been about 30 years but I believe I enjoyed enduring FUCK MY SON! more than I did CANNIBAL FEROX.)
Obviously the writer/director of the movie FUCK MY SON! is gonna be, by definition, a provocateur. I figure the backlash he’s experienced and anything I could write here would only encourage him to explore the technology more. Maybe Megan Griffiths talked some sense into him. Other than that issue though I really respect the spirit of this thing: the defiantly non-mainstream attitude, the let’s-put-on-a-show-but-with-giant-dicks silliness. So as a gesture of good will I’ve saved one of the best things about the movie to discuss last, and that is that it’s a reunion of the two stars of THE CATECHISM CATACLYSM, both under enough makeup that I might not have known right away if I hadn’t seen the credits.
I never would’ve expected Robert Longstreet (THE OLD MAN & THE GUN) to play a role like Vermina, which at first glance doesn’t seem to let him use his super power for feeling genuine. But it’s so fun to see him fully dedicated to playing a hateful, hobbling old hag, and there are times when his voice and contemptuous glares break through the absurdity of the situation to actually be chilling. I would not want to encounter this lady.
That of course leaves Steve Little (HEARTS IN ATLANTIS) to be the guy inside the giant foam monster costume, and if you’re familiar with him you can imagine how his eyes and teeth and voice and drool could be attached to a slimy, horny baby-man. Once you see it you can’t really picture anybody else playing Fabian, or Fabian having any other voice. You even see the simple doodle of the comic book and think “Yes, of course, Steve Little.” The role he was born to play.
I should note that there’s a weirdly high amount of drool coming from the non-monster characters as well, in particular Sandi. I don’t know Newton from anything else but she’s also a key to this thing working, impressively throwing herself into the hard-to-imagine intersection between survival horror victim and mom in a comedy. She has to play her horrible treatment and desperation to save her daughter as real without us getting too upset about it to laugh. And I can tell you, we were laughing, maybe even including the majority of the crowd who rushed out the exit before the Q&A. All things considered I recommend FUCK MY SON! to those of you who would consider seeing a movie called FUCK MY SON!.
For your consideration in all categories – FUCK MY SON!. As far as an adapted screenplay, my understanding is that most of it is extremely faithful to the source material, except that Queen Latifah is in the comic and gets shot, while the movie goes in a different direction. Here are my updated 2025 comic book movie rankings.
Disclaimer: I have not seen CAPTAIN AMERICA: BRAVE NEW WORLD or THE OLD GUARD 2 and I’ve left off RED SONJA because I’m not sure how to rate its mild low budget charms against the slicker movies that maybe I wanted more out of but were technically more effective.
4. THE FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS
3. THUNDERBOLTS*
2. FUCK MY SON!
1. SUPERMAN
What do the other comic book fans think? Where do you rank FUCK MY SON!? Let me know in the comments!
#comicbooks #comicbookmovies #geekculture #fuckmyson #hormelchili
