Bullets of Justice: Lurid, Crass, Vulgar Horror Lowers the Bar on Bar-Lowering

By Thom Ernst

Rating: C

In competition for WTF movie of the year, Bullets of Justice is a clean sweep. And unless something stranger lurks in the backlogs of the VOD catalog, it’s not likely to be outdone by year’s end.

The story is set in the days after a third world war leaves the planet a devastated sphere of dust and ruin. New York City is infested (as is the entire world) with pig-people known as Muzzles, a grotesque hybrid of animal and man.

Muzzles come from experimental breeding of humans with pigs (one of the few distressing possibilities the film spare us from witnessing) in hopes of creating an army of super-soldiers. The creation of super-soldiers fails, but there is a massive growth of Muzzles who turn Earth into a pigsty and humans into farmed, fattened, and tightly sealed packages of slop.

Did I mention that Bullets of Justice is not a prestige film?

The film opens on an overhead shot tracking a brightly lit row of collapsed buildings. Among the ruins, a man digs a hole in cemetery grounds. But the cemetery is long past the point of receiving the dead, so the dead can only be unburied. Then in juxtaposition to unearthing the grave—and in anticipation of the chaos ahead—is a boy riding on the back of a large hog, a moment of uncommon harmony.

It’s a reminder, intentional or not, that pigs are intelligent, docile creatures. I understand they make for great pets. But Bullets of Justice is not Babe: Pig in the City. It’s not even Porky’s. The movie is the pig version of Planet of the Apes, only sloppier and without a Cornelius to counter the evils of a Dr. Zaius.

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

Bullets of Justice is unmistakably crass and vulgar, full of body bits and fluids—a movie to answer those who claim to have seen everything by responding that everything was just the beginning.

Timur Turisbekov, who co-writes the screenplay, plays Rob Justice. As a boy, Justice witnesses a vicious attack on his father by a Muzzle. His narrow escape is thwarted by a subsequent attack from an armed military group assigned to eliminate all witnesses. Justice and his sister, Raksha (Doroteya Toleva), survive.

Twenty-five years later, Justice is a hardened bounty hunter, the favoured hired gun of an underground militant group of resistors. He’s a dark, brooding killer with a truck full of photos of the dead partners—all women—he’s lost to violence along the way. He sheds a quiet tear, but a voice from his mentor chastises him. “You’re not crying over” p***y? Never cry over p***y”.

And so Justice steels his jaw and moves on.

It’s that kind of movie.

His sister, Raksha, a fierce warrior sporting a prominent mustache (it’s explained but only if you have the ability to read lips) is now a top agent for the resistance.

Brother and sister meet again, and when they do, they become hot and passionate lovers. Yes, they recognize each other. Granted, they are not blood-related, but still.

That kind of movie.

The film is tough to categorize, although its most comfortable fit seems to be in the horror genre, where it can roll in an excess of gore, excrement, and depravity with all the freedom a barnyard animal. But it’s also part science fiction and, depending on how dark your humour, a bleak, decrepit comedy. Still, there isn’t much in the way of social parody going. It’s crass simply for the sake of being crass.

Some moments in Bullets of Justice seem inspired, as when Danny Trejo shows up denouncing the existence of God while clutching a human skull like a B-movie Hamlet. Then there is a whole other kind of inspiration at work when Justice jams a gun through the anus of a corpse so that the genitals become a makeshift gun shaft.

Yep. That kind of movie.

There can be art in a complete disregard for artistry, and beauty—at least a perverse beauty— in an honest pursuit of the hideous. But that’s not what Bullets of Justice achieves. For all its indulgence and hell-bent resolve to offend, the film ends up flailing in series of confounding psychedelic overlaps, like a supercomputer foiled when confronted with an unanswerable question or illogical premise. The whole thing just does not compute.

Bullets of Justice will have its defenders citing value in its ability to challenge the bounds of decency. And there is a giddy joy in the film’s fearless dips into decadence and violence as well as a cathartic freedom in baring the warts and scabs of the human condition— or in the case of Bullets of Justice—the sub-human condition.

But despite the film’s lurid and outrageous content there is nothing that is truly shocking. For all its commitment to toppling the pillars of virtue and trashing good taste, Bullets of Justice is ardently conservative. Its values are rooted in a single-minded determination to conquer an identifiable evil. And the film’s willful toss of suspicion towards authority figures and fastidious male preening seems to be adhering to an inflexible ideology.

At best, Bullets of Justice can leave us marveling at the film’s ability to finesse bad taste into some variant form of bizarre, artful anti-cinema. But there is simply no silk to get out of this sow’s ear.

Bullets of Justice. Directed by Valeri Milev. Starring Danny Trejo, Timur Turisbekov and Doroteya Toleva. Available October 23 on all digital VOD platforms, including: iTunes/AppleTV; Amazon; Vimeo, Xbox, and Google Play.