Fuck My Son!, 2025.
Directed by Todd Rohal.
Starring Tipper Newton, Robert Longstreet, Steve Little, and Kynzie Colmery.
SYNOPSIS:
A mother’s manic quest pulls an unwitting bystander into a twisted, obscene ordeal that spirals into lunacy and terror.
Few films beg for a one-star review more than Todd Rohal’s Fuck My Son!, a supposed midnight-movie provocation that stalls somewhere between exploitation edginess and hollow homage. It instead plays like a tedious endurance test: a film convinced it’s transgressive and hilarious, when in reality it’s as flat and stale as the jokes it won’t stop repeating. It is fatphobic, transphobic, sexist and ableist but it at least has the courtesy of warning you about its depravity upfront.
The film opens with its much-touted “Perv-o-Vision” gimmick: an instructional video urging the audience to wear cardboard 3D glasses during certain scenes. The result is a kaleidoscopic blur that obscures rather than enhances. It’s not that the effect fails; it’s that the film never intends it to succeed. The mere presence of the gimmick is treated as sufficient, as if the idea alone absolves the filmmakers from the burden of execution. In that way, it’s a perfect metaphor for the movie itself: a collection of half-formed provocations paraded as subversive, with no interest in whether they actually work.
The plot concerns a kidnapped mother and daughter trapped by an elderly woman (Robert Longstreet in drag) who demands that the mother deflower her monstrous son. It’s a premise with transgressive bite; in execution, it’s simply dull. Rohal settles for a patchwork of references—Silence of the Lambs here, Texas Chain Saw Massacre there—without the imagination to rework or expand them. The “monster”—a sticky, skinless creature realized with work by effects veteran Robert Kurtzman—straddles the line between pitiable and grotesque, but Rohal never commits to either. Instead, the film tries to have it both ways, dragging every sequence out until it collapses under its own inertia.
Much of the film’s 94-minute runtime is padded with recycled jokes and familiar exploitation tropes, including the frustrating cliché of a protagonist armed with a gun but refusing to use it. While the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre was transgressive in 1974 (and 11 minutes shorter), Rohal’s recycling of its contempt for “southern yokels” now feels dated and unimaginative. Even nods to cinematic classics—such as a doorway shot recalling The Searchers—come across less as homage than an empty citation.
Rohal seems convinced that sharing his contempt for his characters with his audience, and borrowing from greater craftsmen constitutes boundary-pushing cinema. In truth, it’s just lazy. What’s billed as shocking is merely juvenile, what’s billed as bold is boring, and what’s billed as funny barely qualifies as a punchline. Even the monster, unimaginatively designed, looks less like a nightmare and more like the effects team gave up halfway and ran out of money.
I can applaud the movie for going to places I did not think I would see with a full audience in a theatre. In those instances Tipper Newton, Kynzie Colmery and Robert Longstreet sell their roles with silly B-movie level conviction. Their commitment, however, only highlights how little effort the film expends around them. Meanwhile, a claymation inspired subplot offers a reminder of just how little the film’s humour works.
Fuck My Son! strains to live off shock value but lacks the humor or direction to land. The bravest act of its viewing is the audience’s patience. Trimmed of repetitive jokes & dragged out sequences and redundant double ending, it might qualify as a 2 a.m. dare but until then most of the fun of experiencing the film begins and ends with its title.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ / Movie: ★
Will Hume
