It looks like 2017 is turning out to be a pretty nasty year for film. There's that cannibalistic Raw movie that's getting a wide release on 10 March that made people actually puke at the Toronto Film Festival last year. There's that Santa Clarita Diet series where Drew Barrymore plays a cannibal zombie mom and carries around a cooler with body parts (out on Netflix Feb. 3). Now there's Kuso, from Flying Lotus, which had quite the debut at Sundance over the weekend.

According to reports, there were mass walk-outs at the film's premiere on Saturday. Here's a detailed description of what happened from The Verge:

A large chunk of the audience left my screening early, when a boil-covered woman choked a man with a strap until he covered half her face with semen that looked like a muted version of Nickelodeon slime. But the walk-outs continued in a consistent stream up to the final scene. Some gross-out films are one-note, but Kuso finds new ways to test viewers' fortitude. Some folks stuck around after a woman chewed on concrete until her teeth disintegrated, but still peaced out when an alien creature force-yanked a fetus from another woman's womb (accompanied by a Mortal Kombat sound clip: "Get over here!"), then smoked the tiny corpse.

Yes, it sounds disgusting, but before you pass judgement, keep in mind that the film comes from an impressive group of accomplished artists, musicians, filmmakers, and actors. Along with Flying Lotus—who directed and created the soundtrack with Thundercat and Kamasi Washington—Kuso stars Hannibal Burress, Tim Heidecker, and George Clinton. The Verge critic even acknowledges that the "film is bookended by some genuinely thoughtful spoken-word poetry that hints at heavy, important questions of social and political turmoil."

Flying Lotus has since tweeted that the walk outs weren't as bad as they've been described.

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Either way, people walking out of a movie is usually pretty good promotion for an unknown indie film. And negative press from a film festival isn't necessarily a bad thing—people at Cannes booed Martin Scorsese's classic Taxi Driver in 1976.

Here's how the Sundance Institute describes the plot of Kuso:

Broadcasted through a makeshift network of discarded televisions, this story is tangled up in the aftermath of Los Angeles's worst earthquake nightmare. Travel between screens and aftershocks into the twisted lives of the survived.

But that doesn't change the fact that there's an actual penis-stabbing scene. Here's the trailer for the film, which is still pretty unpleasant. Art!

From: Esquire US