Are you interested in watching two people with enormous cold sores on their lips kiss very very passionately? Do you like the idea of a hellish demon being birthed out of the anus of a poppers addict?  Do you long for a movie that does not take itself seriously? At all?

Well, boy howdy, have I got a flick for you!

Assholes opens with Adah Shapiro (Betsey Brown) delivering a five-minute monologue in her therapist’s office about how incredibly horny she’s been lately. On and on she goes, complaining, contemplating, and bemoaning the fact of her unsatisfied libido, he said, delicately. She certainly makes an interesting first impression. We then cut to her brother, Adam (Peter Vack, Brown’s real-life brother) talking to his friend Aaron (Jack Dunphy) about a yellowish discharge from his penis, that he wiggles at Aaron to check out.

Yep.

Aaron, come to find out, enjoys the look, smell, and taste of ass in a sexual manner (quelle surprise) and, in even more of a coincidence, Adah is quite open (heh) to the idea.  Aaron and Adah become a couple, fueling their sexual escapades with huge amounts (seriously–hundreds of bottles) of poppers they buy at the corner market.  During all this, a cold sore that started on Adam, transferred to Adah, and then to Aaron just gets bigger and bigger and flaming red and crusty. 

Aaron’s penis gets to display this infection in a nice close-up, too.  Spoiler.

Are you there, yet? Have you reached the saturation point? Have you read enough?  You ain’t seen nothing yet.

There are a few funny scenes where the three of them try to have a pleasant dinner with Adam and Adah’s parents, Anne and Anthony (Brown’s and Vack’s real-life parents, Jane and Ron Brown) (and I think I may have just hit my meta limit).  The parents are trying hard to give their immature kids space and support, but are also trying to steer them in the right direction. The kids can be either serious, aloof, sarcastic, demanding, or just plain psychotic depending on how many drugs are coursing through their bodies or, frankly, when the scene shows up in the movie’s running time. The way these characters were in the first twenty minutes is definitely not how they are in the last twenty.

And we haven’t even touched (heh) on the anal birth of Mephistopheles (Eileen Dietz) a demon who looks suspiciously like a middle-aged woman, Adam’s path to respectability via psychoanalysis, the cheesy sphincter prosthetics, the “Intervention” episode, or the ballsy eight-minute section where newly-in-love and totally-popper’d-up Aaron and Adah wander the streets and stores of New York arguing and challenging and screwing around with actual bystanders on the street (and, it seems, nearly getting into fistfights or arrested). I’ll grant that it’s a brave choice, for actor and filmmaker alike, but it probably goes on a few minutes too long.

There’s probably a lot of scenes in this movie that go on a few minutes too long.  That said, I actually did like Assholes. Well, maybe “liked” is too strong a word. Admired? Appreciated? Whatever, it certainly held my interest throughout its thankfully brief running time of 74 minutes, if only to satisfy the nagging question, “Where the hell is this thing going next??”

I guarantee you have no idea.  

Assholes premiered at SXSW on March 11, 2017.