Sundance Attendees Walk Out Of Flying Lotus Film: “I Tried To Warn Folks”

The objective of good art is to push boundaries, which is something prolific experimental producer Flying Lotus, aka Steven Ellison, has done a fine job of with his first feature film, going so far with the absurdity of Kuso that a number of Sundance Film Festival attendees walked out of a screening.

The post-apocalyptic film unfolds “after a devastating earthquake in Los Angeles” and features a star-studded cast that includes Hannibal Buress, George Clinton, Tim Heidecker, The Buttress and Anders Holm of Workaholics fame, with music by Aphex Twins, Flying Lotus and Japanese video game composer Akira Yamaoka.

As Variety reports, “10 minutes of boil-bursting, pus-oozing revulsion” saw a number of attendees at a midnight screening leave the cinema.

Flying Lotus took to Twitter to downplay the incident, claiming it was only “20 people out of like 400 who walked out” and it wasn’t as dramatic as everyone was making out be, also stating he “tried to warn folks”.

“The public crowd loved it and stayed. The press screening had the "walkouts" who cares?” he posted in a follow-up tweet.

A review by The Verge goes into detail about certain parts, including an interesting scene that features George Clinton: “Doc pulls down his pants and has the patient sing into his hairy, wrinkled anus in order to wake a toddler-sized cockroach.”

The film was directed by Ellison and co-written with David Firth (Salad Fingers, Spoilsbury Toast Boy) and Zack Fox, and it appears its wider release is still in the works:

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