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James Gunn was newly employed by Troma when he was tasked with writing a movie by Lloyd Kaufman. Gunn said (via Destroy the Brain):
“He [Kaufman] said,’I want you to write one of three screenplays. Either “The Toxic Avenger 4,” something else you could come up with on your own, or “Tromeo and Juliet.” The last one I wanted to write was “Tromeo and Juliet.”‘ It seemed completely unappealing to me, but that was the one he wanted me to write. So I got paid $150 to write that. Once I got paid to write it I was so excited about doing it and having a movie with my name in it, I went full force… as hard as I could… basically taking over the production.”
Gunn certainly got into the swing of things quickly, because “Tromeo and Juliet” is just as aggressively crude, gross, and stupid as any of the studio’s other key movies. Lowlights include repetitive fart gags, a close-up nipple piercing, eye-gougings and decapitations, incest, a penis monster, and gratuitous softcore sex scenes. That’s all par for the course if you buy into the whole Troma thing, but it feels incredibly plodding and one-note when dragged out to almost two hours.
On the plus side, you have Lemmy from Motorhead as the narrator, and some decent chemistry between Tromeo (Will Keenan) and Juliet (Jane Jensen), which Kaufman encouraged the actors to develop offscreen. Kaufman is credited as director, while Gunn received the more ambiguous title of Associate Director:
“I basically directed the actors. Lloyd’s a director. He’s basically in charge of everything but I deal with the actors and a lot of the creative stuff. It’s a real partnership between us, in terms of the movie. You know with Troma, those lines are very blurred.”
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