Sugar Rot Review
Sugar Rot (2025) Film Review from the 24th Annual Fantasia Film Festival, a movie directed by Becca Kozak, written by Becca Kozak, and starring Chloe Macleod, Drew Forster, Michela Ross, and Charles Lysne.
In the ’70s, exploitation referred to movies like I Spit on Your Grave, which features explicit sexual themes like rape, murder, and vengeance, playing horrific content for a quick buck. The curious thing about pictures like that is that, despite being made for a jeering audience eager for cheap thrills, they are often produced by the very groups that are being exploited.
Such is the case of Beca Kozak’s latest masterpiece (disasterpiece?), Sugar Rot. In an almost fairytale setup, our main character, Candy (played by relatively new actress, Chloe Macleod), is working in an ice cream parlor. This setting is very, very quickly disrupted when the ice cream deliveryman takes her into the backroom and brutally, graphically rapes her, his grossly discolored manhood an absurdly massive rubber prosthetic. It’s a gruesome sequence, uncomfortably long and employing pornographic techniques in an effort to further upset its viewers. As Candy’s life deteriorates, it’s a wise decision, and the Troma camp elements make for an incredibly terrifying experience.
Candy has an STD from the ice cream man that makes her skin and secretions taste sugary-sweet, making her irresistible to her boyfriend Sid (a reference to the quintessential punk rocker, Sid Vicious). He treats her like a hungry dog and ignores her more and more as the movie goes on. When she tries to end the pregnancy at the town’s only abortion clinic—run by the eerie Dr. Gordon—it turns out that the STD is actually a pregnancy. He can’t resist licking up the sugary fluids leaking from the sores on her face and body, just like all the other men in town, and he can’t bring himself to abort the damned child that is causing her ice cream leprosy.
From the intense opening sequence, which features out-of-tune punk music over candy and ice cream and naked Barbie dolls, to the bizarre scenes of a rubber baby pumping goo through Candy’s body, the intensity of this film’s vision lingers like a trauma that I just can’t shake. It’s a nasty film that’s a little too long and has an unnecessary fourth act. The director makes her point, but you might laugh, grimace, or even want to turn the film off. The typical man doesn’t even consider issues like sexual assault, abortion, or women’s needs and complaints, and addressing them is unpleasant work that only gets worse the more you ignore them. This is an exploitation film through and through, and like the video nasties of yesteryear, Sugar Rot is here to assault you as much as it is here to force you to think and feel.
Rating: 7/10
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