Bad Milo! (2013)

Stressed out milquetoast office worker Duncan (an excellent and engaging performance by Ken Marino) discovers that he has an angry little beast named Milo living in his intestines who occasionally comes out of his rear end to kill anyone who causes Duncan to feel either mad or upset. Director/co-writer Jacob Vaughan relates the enjoyably off-the-wall story at a zippy pace, maintains a likeable quirky tone throughout, gets lots of laughs from the hysterical sense of no-holds-barred outrageous humor, and even manages a few tender and touching moments amid all the jaw-dropping lunacy. The adorably grotesque Milo serves as a strong metaphor for the potentially toxic and destructive consequences wrought by letting one's deeply repressed id and subconscious run amuck as well as the need to face your emotional and psychological demons head on in order to make peace with said demons. Moreover, it's acted with aplomb by an enthusiastic cast: Gillian Jacobs as Duncan's sweet and concerned wife Jillian, Peter Stormare as flaky therapist Highsmith, Mary Kay Place as Duncan's loopy mother Beatrice, and Patrick Warburton as jerky boss Phil. An absolute hoot.

BAD MILO! is a one-note comedy about an ordinary office worker who is perplexed to discover that a polyp inside his colon turns out to be a mischievous demon living inside his bowel. The demon subsequently pops out from time to time to commit gruesome murder, while his host has to figure out what to do about the situation without losing his mind.If this set-up sounds familiar, it's because the whole thing is copied lock, stock, and barrel from Stephen King's DREAMCATCHER, which they did a movie adaptation of back in the day. However, this film goes for the comedy horror approach and turns out to be not very funny at all. The jokes are obvious and begin to get repetitive after a while, and the gross-out scenes are pretty awful. The two things this has going for it are Peter Stormare in support and some decent animation used to bring the demon puppet to life.

Where to start with this movie. When I first started watching it I wasn't blown away, the acting was good (I'm looking at you Patrick Warburton) but the main guy, Duncan, just struck me as an unlikable mook. Then the ass demon appeared and the whole thing changed. I suddenly found myself not only laughing at the absurdity of it all but also taken aback by the feels and not the feels that one would imagine having from an ass demon crawling his way back into your ass but more as if he had crawled his way into my heart. The whole shebang really takes a turn when Milo, the brown town demon, crawls its way from Duncan's ruined sphincter to kill the people who hurt him and you start to understand what makes this anxious dork tick. As revealed during a therapy session with a kooky hypnotist, Duncan's father had abandoned him as a child and with Duncan's wife wanting a baby he is faced with something that people with abandonment issues often face. An issue I myself faced and that is the fear that we will end up like our fathers. This point is driven home even more when it is revealed that Duncan's father also has an ass demon and that Duncan's wife is finally pregnant. Upon hearing the news Duncan does exactly what his father did, he turns and runs, unable to process. Did I just find an emotional connection to a guy who spends part of the movie trying to feed cat food to a wide eyed demon that crawled out of his butt? DamnDuncan shows the classic signs of someone who had an absent parent. He feels anxious in supervisory rolls, feels helpless, unimportant, as if what he wants and what he feels doesn't matter. Milo embodies his internal and his external stresses, his desires and his rages, the things he won't let himself address. As he tries to bond with Milo, at the behest of that nutty therapist, it symbolizes not just coming to terms with those parts of himself ("I know you were only dong that for me.") but also coming to terms with the fact that he is not his father. Milo and him take on an almost father/son dynamic toward the end of the film, with Milo calling him "papa" after he had chopped off the poor little guys arm and legs with an ax. That scene itself is one of the most moving parts of the film for a lot of reasons. Not only does Duncan gain control of his darker desires but he accepts Milo back into his ass with the help of his pregnant wife, essentially showing the act of becoming a responsible father helped him accept his own worth. In the end we find Duncan the head of his own company, getting ready for the baby and even taking care of his now invalid father. The gore was a little cheesy and some of the acting was a little ham-fisted but in the end there are a ton of laughs to be found here and enough comically gruesome scenes for any danger dog to scratch his bone.

'Bad Milo' is a horror comedy starring Ken Marino who plays Duncan, an average man with an average life and a not so average creature living in his intestines. When Duncan begins getting stomach pains he assumes they are caused by the stress in his life, but there is actually a much less rational explanation. He soon finds out that he has a creature inhabiting his body; a fierce little monster who comes out through his butt to take revenge on the stress factors in his life. The creature, who looks like a cross between a demon and the "I'm the baby, gotta love me" dinosaur, and Duncan co-exist but how long can the situation stay under control? One might assume that a movie containing a creature that pops out of a man's butt to kill people would be stupid, but 'Bad Milo' is actually very well put together. Writers Benjamin Hayes and Jacob Vaughan succeed in creating a movie with immature subject matter conveyed in a non repugnant way. Milo, the killer hemorrhoid has his own personality and becomes as crucial to the movie as the other characters. At times you let your guard down thinking "he is kind of cute isn't he?" then you remember he came from a guy's butt.Ken Marino is perfect fit playing the typical "everything about me is average" guy, but he also manages to step up and wedge himself into the hero role. The movie introduces psychological elements such as accepting your Id and also delves into family relationships. 'Bad Milo' never goes completely over the top to the point of losing the viewer, and although I found it enjoyable I think it would have been more successful as a short film. Certain aspects of the story start to become tedious but then a monster pops out of a butt and grabs your attention yet again.