Tromeo and Juliet: Troma Does Shakespeare

The tagline on the video-shop sleeve promised body piercing, kinky sex, dismemberment, and the things that made Shakespeare great. Somebody at Troma wrote that in 1996 and it is, on the evidence of the film, an entirely accurate contents listing and a serious critical position.

Tromeo and Juliet was directed by Lloyd Kaufman, produced with Michael Herz, made in Manhattan for a sum in the low six figures, narrated in verse by Lemmy of Motörhead, and co-written by a Troma employee named James Gunn, for whom it was a first screenplay. Everything you have heard about it is true. It is also — and this is the part nobody says out loud — the most textually attentive Shakespeare adaptation of the 1990s, a decade that included Baz Luhrmann’s version of the same play, released within months of this one.

I say that with a straight face. Let me argue it.

What Kaufman actually noticed

Romeo and Juliet is a play about two rich families conducting a feud through their children, in which teenagers meet, become obsessed within a day, marry in secret, and are dead by the end of the week, having been failed by every adult who might have intervened. It contains an appalling amount of sex material, most of it in the mouths of the servants and the Nurse, which four centuries of school editions have carefully declined to explain.

Kaufman and Gunn’s version relocates the Montagues and Capulets to New York as rival film producers — a joke about Troma that Troma is fully entitled to make — gives Juliet a father whose control over her is straightforwardly monstrous, and lets the sex material run at the volume Shakespeare wrote it. Will Keenan plays Tromeo Que as a boy with no interiority and infinite conviction. Jane Jensen plays Juliet as somebody genuinely trapped, and — this is the film’s secret — she plays it for real.

That is the adaptation’s actual insight. Almost every reverent Romeo and Juliet treats the tragedy as romantic. Kaufman treats it as a story about child abuse in a rich household, and then makes a Troma film on top of that foundation. The reverent versions are the ones that soften the play.

The Nurse is the proof. Shakespeare’s Nurse is a bawdy, garrulous servant who has raised Juliet since infancy and whose devotion to the girl is the only functioning adult relationship in the text — and who, when it matters, advises Juliet to commit bigamy and forget the boy, because that is what the household requires. Every school production plays her as comic relief. Troma casts Debbie Rochon, gives the role a physical intimacy with Juliet that the play has always half-implied, and keeps the betrayal intact. A Troma film noticed that the Nurse is the tragedy’s hinge. Four hundred years of respectable staging has mostly used her for laughs and then wondered why the fourth act does not land.

The mechanics: why the vulgarity is a structural device

Here is the craft argument, because there is one.

Gunn’s screenplay does something specific with Shakespeare’s language: it keeps the verse in the mouths of the people who are lying and puts the filth in the mouths of the people who are telling the truth. Lemmy’s prologue is delivered in proper metre, in a voice made of gravel and Marlboro, and the effect of hearing that voice do that scansion is to make the poetry sound like a threat — which, in a play that opens by telling you both leads will die, it is.

Then the film’s rhythm. Kaufman cuts Tromeo at Troma’s house tempo, which is to say relentlessly, and he intercuts the sincere material with the outrages so tightly that neither gets to settle. A tender scene runs ninety seconds and is interrupted by an atrocity. This sounds like adolescence and functions as structure: the play’s own tonal problem is that it is a comedy for two acts and a tragedy for three, and hinges on a single street fight. Kaufman never lets the comedy establish itself, so the hinge does not have to bear the weight.

The gore is Troma-standard, which means practical, gleeful and hand-built — latex, karo, prosthetics, and no interest whatsoever in your suspension of disbelief. It looks fake because it was made by hand in a room in New York, and I will take that over a smooth digital wound every time, for reasons I set out in why practical gore ages better than CGI blood. The film’s celebrated transformation sequence — a young man’s anxiety about his own body rendered with rubber and enthusiasm — is a Cronenberg riff performed by people who could not afford Cronenberg’s insurance, and it is funnier than Cronenberg because it is embarrassed.

And the New York is real. Kaufman shoots on actual streets, in actual apartments, with actual weather, which gives the film a documentary underlayer that its content works hard to contradict. The Manhattan of Tromeo and Juliet is the Manhattan of 1996 — pre-clean-up, still grubby, still affordable to people making a film like this — and thirty years on that is straightforwardly the most valuable footage in it.

The Gunn question

It is impossible to watch this now without watching for him, so let us do it properly.

What is present in the Gunn of 1996 is a very particular tonal move: he will build a joke out of something disgusting and then, in the same breath, ask you to care about the person it happened to. The disgust is the setup and the sincerity is the punchline, which is the exact inversion of how comedy usually runs. That manoeuvre — a talking raccoon’s grief, a man made of rubbish being loved — is the entire basis of his subsequent career, and it is here in a Troma film about a boy who turns into a monster, fully formed, aged twenty-six.

What is absent is control. The film has no idea when to stop, which is Troma’s aesthetic and also Troma’s ceiling. Gunn spent nine years there. Whatever you think of the destination, this is the workshop, and you can see the tools being picked up.

The real ancestor

The lineage that matters is Troma’s own. The Toxic Avenger established the house method — a genuine satirical thesis, delivered by people covered in slime, at a volume that lets the studio claim it was only joking. Tromeo is that method applied to a canonical text, which is the hardest test the method ever took, because canonical texts have defences.

Beyond the family, the true ancestor is the 42nd Street exploitation film that took a respectable property and ran it through the grinder — the tradition of adapting classics as a licence rather than as an homage. And its sibling in New York grot is Street Trash: both films are about a city that has given up, shot in that city, by people who lived in it.

For the opposite pole of Shakespeare-in-genre, Forbidden Planet transplanted The Tempest to a distant world with a straight face and an MGM budget, and remains the respectable end of the same instinct. And if you want proof that the Troma label could produce something with no jokes in it at all, Combat Shock is waiting in the same catalogue, and it is the bleakest thing the company ever put its name on.

The honest case against

Tromeo and Juliet runs somewhere around a hundred and seven minutes, and it should run eighty. The Troma house style has no editor’s conscience; every good idea is repeated until it stops working, and the middle stretch is padded with material that exists because it was shot.

The film’s transgression is also, in places, simply lazy. There is a difference between the sex material Shakespeare wrote — which is about something, usually class and hypocrisy — and a gag that exists because somebody thought of it. Kaufman cannot always tell those apart, and the film’s habit of treating every taboo as equivalent flattens the ones that are load-bearing.

And the performances outside the leads are broad in the specific Troma way that reads as contempt for the audience’s patience. Jensen and Keenan are doing real work in a film where most of the cast is mugging.

The verdict, though. Every school in Britain teaches this play as a romance and every production I have sat through has been embarrassed by its own text. Kaufman and Gunn read it as a story about two children destroyed by their parents’ money, kept the filth Shakespeare put in it, and made something with an actual argument. It is disgusting, overlong, and correct.

Where to find it: Troma has kept its catalogue in circulation with characteristic shamelessness, and Tromeo streams free on the company’s own channel in a perfectly watchable state. The commentary tracks are worth your time.

Spoilers below

The ending is the reason this piece exists, and it is the boldest thing Troma ever did.

Kaufman and Gunn get their lovers to the tomb, run the play’s machinery, and then decline the deaths. Tromeo and Juliet live. And then the film reveals its buried card: the families’ feud has a secret at the bottom of it, and the secret means the two of them are siblings.

They marry anyway. The final passage is a domestic idyll — a house, a garden, a marriage, children — played completely warmly, with the children’s condition presented as an ordinary fact of the household. It is the single most Troma gesture in the company’s history, and it lands as something stranger than provocation.

Consider what it does to the source. Shakespeare’s ending is a reconciliation purchased with two corpses; the Prince’s closing lines are about the price the fathers paid. Kaufman refuses to pay it. He gives the children the future the play denies them, at the cost of making that future grotesque, and the grotesquerie is entirely the parents’ doing — the incest is the fathers’ secret, the deformity is the fathers’ inheritance, and the two survivors are perfectly happy inside the wreckage they were handed.

That is a reading of Romeo and Juliet. A crude one, delivered by a company whose logo is a man in a tutu holding a mop. It is also the only version I have seen that lets the teenagers win, and it has the decency to make winning look like this.