“The State” and “Party Down” alum Ken Marino plays a man with an ass demon in “Bad Milo!”
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In the horror-comedy “Bad Milo,” “The State” and “Party Down” veteran Ken Marino plays a man whose stress manifests as a bloodthirsty demon that lives in his intestines and emerges from him in, let’s say, a very painful way to take revenge on his enemies. For toilet humor aficionado Marino, the project was right up his alley.
This film has a very particular brand of humor.
Yeah, it was my kind of thing when I read the script. Joe Lo Truglio, who I was in “The State” with, and myself in college — and for many years after college — and Ben Garant would just go out and rent whatever stupid, weird-looking horror movies we could find on the shelf. Back then it was VHS. We’d go to Kim’s Video in New York, and we would find the weirdest looking thing and be like, “Okay, let’s watch this” — sometimes high, sometimes not, but mostly high. That would be the fun thing to do in our 20s.
Any personal favorites from that time?
For some reason, “Pumpkinhead” and “Luther the Geek” both stand out to me. I don’t even remember the stories anymore, but I remember specific moments, like one specific moment from each of those that has not escaped my memory in over 25 years. We would watch those and “Leprechaun,” all that sort of stuff. “Basket Case,” “Dead Alive,” everything. So when I read this I was like, “Oh, this is kind of sort of like that.” So I was very much into it. If you’ve followed anything I’ve done in my career, I very much embrace specifically toilet bowl humor, and I think that has something to do with the fact that my dad was a cesspool cleaner. I would go work with him and we would clean out different people cesspools, and we had a cesspool truck in our house. And then he had a Porta Potty business and we would clean out Porta Potties.
Is that where you character’s job in “Wanderlust” came from?
That’s where the job in “Wanderlust” came from. So I’m not shy to be around toilets. I can’t escape it, but it’s also a universal theme. We all s—, don’t we? We all sometimes have bad s—s. This is an extension and an extreme version of somebody taking a bad s—.
I’m not usually a fan of poop or fart jokes myself.
Farting jokes are hard, farting jokes are hard. If you can do a good fart joke, it’s great, I applaud you. And s— jokes are hard. Sometimes I’ll do a s— joke, and sometimes the scene just calls for the person to be on the s—er.
I thought it was delightful, but there were some people at my screening who didn’t care for it, to put it mildly.
It’s certainly an acquired taste. Even if it wasn’t a movie about something coming out of somebody’s ass, my guess would be those people don’t like these types of movies that you and I like anyway. The monster movies that we kind of dug in the ’80s and ’90s, those movies are not going to appeal to necessarily an older group of people. And then to top it off, I do s— it out my a—hole. Several times.
The sequence where Milo goes back up is probably the harder part to watch.
Is it? Is it really? Huh. I love that scene. It’s a beautiful moment.
