For the uninitiated, Troma is the world’s longest-running independent film studio, run since the seventies by Lloyd Kaufman. Their ethos is simple: make everything outrageous, gory, juvenile, and politically incorrect, but never boring. They gave us The Toxic Avenger, Class of Nuke ’Em High, and countless films in which heads explode for no reason other than the budget could stretch to it.
Tromeo & Juliet came during a high-water mark for the studio, when Kaufman was still refining his brand of cheap lunacy. What set this one apart was a script co-written by a young James Gunn. Yes, that James Gunn, the man who's now in charge of the squeaky clean DC Cinematic Universe.
Back then, though, he was writing incest gags and dream sequences where Juliet is attacked by a penis monster that looks like the combined mass of all the cock Bonnie Blue has ever taken, coagulated into one singular, monstrous shaft. Everyone has to start somewhere.
Despite what you may think, the skeleton of Shakespeare’s story is still here: feuding families, star-crossed lovers, doom lurking at every turn. But in this telling, the Capulets are grotesque pornographers and the Ques (standing in for Montagues) are tattooed degenerates. Tromeo (our Romeo substitute) pines away as a low-rent poet and tattoo parlour drudge. Juliet is kept prisoner in a glass cage by her father, who seems to confuse paternal authority with outright psychosis.
They meet, they fall in love, and then the plot dissolves into a parade of dismemberments, piercings, lusty interludes, and surreal dream sequences. There’s even a narrator - Motörhead’s Lemmy - growling Shakespearean morsels like a beery ringmaster at the circus.
Troma films are infamous for wallowing in sleaze, and Tromeo & Juliet doesn’t disappoint. There’s incest, cannibalism, fetish gear, and gallons of bodily fluids. Yet, and here’s the surprise, it’s not just juvenile shock value. Somewhere beneath the pus and porn, there’s a beating heart. Tromeo and Juliet genuinely like each other, and the film, for all its grotesquerie, seems oddly invested in their happiness.
It’s this tension, between sincerity and scatology, that keeps the whole sordid enterprise entertaining. Like a fart delivered during a funeral, it's not right, but you can’t help laughing anyway.
I grew up on alternative British comedy: The Young Ones, Bottom, anything involving Rik Mayall smashing Adrian Edmondson over the head with a frying pan. Those shows thrived on chaos, slapstick, and gleeful vulgarity.
Tromeo & Juliet reminded me of that spirit. It’s crass and anarchic, filled with pratfalls and cheap shots, but propelled by such manic energy that it becomes endearing. If Rik and Vyvyan had ever decided to stage Shakespeare, it might well have resembled this: fart jokes and violence, with just enough affection for the source material to give it weight.
Some people may clutch their pearls at the idea of Shakespeare reduced to dick jokes and mutilation. But let’s remember the man himself wasn’t above smut. The Elizabethans adored bawdy humour, grotesque violence, and ghostly apparitions. Romeo and Juliet is rife with puns about maidenheads, swords, and “standing” in more ways than one.
Viewed from that angle, Tromeo & Juliet isn’t a desecration but an oddly faithful revival. It translates the play for a modern audience not by sanitising it but by doubling down on filth and blood, precisely the sort of thing that would have had the peasants roaring in 1595. If anything, Kaufman and Gunn captured the true spirit of Shakespeare better than a hundred tedious period dramas ever have.
And yes, it has a giant penis. An enormous, mutant, wobbling penis. If that doesn’t say “timeless romance,” I don’t know what does.
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