Monday, November 7, 2022

Tromeo and Juliet (1996)


High school was a time when teachers would force their students to read “the classics.” It was always some combination of Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and Harper Lee. You would get one or two of those dystopian novels like 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, or The Chrysalids. There were the odd books that would fit into the curriculum of the country you lived in because you needed to know that country’s literary history. In my Canadian high school, we got some Margaret Laurence because all the best Canadian authors are named Margaret. That literature was meant to build your knowledge. It was meant to encourage you to read more.

There is one name that I’ve been avoiding until this point, and it’s a name that most of us will recognize. One writer stood above all others in high school literature. This same writer has inspired many artists, either through the words he created or the stories of his that they adapted. That writer was playwright William Shakespeare.

See? I told you that you would likely recognize that name. You probably even remember which of his plays you read in high school. For me it was Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, and King Lear. If there was one of those that I’m pretty sure everyone had to read, it was Romeo and Juliet. And we probably all had to watch that adaptation of Romeo and Juliet that came out in the 1960s and had a boob in it. Sure, maybe that’s not a big deal now when porn is so easily accessible. But when you grew up before the height of internet video streaming, seeing a boob on the tv in English class was a huge deal.


Building on that point, there have been hundreds of Shakespeare adaptations and reimaginations in film. Almost every filmmaker has been inspired by his work in some way, whether they know it or not. Kenneth Branagh made a career out of Shakespeare adaptations with movies like Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet, and As You Like It. He loves to dive back into the plays of William Shakespeare and present them to the world through his mostly direct adaptations that have his personal directorial touch.

Other filmmakers like to go in a completely different direction with their adaptations. Instead of making a direct representation of Shakespeare’s work, they modernize it. They place it into a different setting. They take the basic concept of a specific play, and make it work in a wholly different context. For example, 10 Things I Hate About You took the idea of The Taming of the Shrew and set it in a modern-day high school scenario. She’s the Man did the same thing for Twelfth Night. As I’ve said many times before, originality rarely comes from stories anymore. It tends to come from how the story is told.

Nothing can prove that point more than, and here I go back to that high school boob moment once again, Romeo and Juliet. Throughout the history of film, there have been adaptations upon adaptations upon adaptations of what might be the most famous William Shakespeare work. It is a love story that people have found a way to adapt into many different contexts. There have been gangs. There have been zombies. There have even been animated gnomes. People write what they know, and almost everyone knows Romeo and Juliet thanks to high school literature classes.


Tromeo and Juliet was an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet set in the world of Troma flicks. Tromeo Que (Will Keenan) was the son of Monty Que (Earl McKoy), who was in a long feud with Cappy Capulet (Maximillian Shaun). It was a feud so major that people who associated with the Ques hated people who associated with the Capulets. Things would change, however, when Tromeo fell in love with Juliet Capulet (Jane Jensen), Cappy’s daughter and sexual abuse victim. Yeah, there was some incest going on.

If you know Troma, which I somewhat do, you’ll know that they produce schlocky movies. Their films always have gratuitous violence, nudity, and profanity in different mixtures. Tromeo and Juliet was no different. In adapting Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy into the Troma form, all those things were added. People were beheaded. Tromeo and Juliet got naked and bumped uglies. Murray (Valentine Miele) went on a tirade of profane insults at Tyrone (Patrick Connor) when Tyrone was searching for Tromeo. It was a Troma film through and through, and one of the only times I’ve seen Shakespeare tackled in this sort of way.

I’m not talking about modernized versions of the Romeo and Juliet story, like the Baz Luhrmann version with their longswords (I haven’t actually seen that version, the guns are the only thing I know), or the more recent Die in a Gunfight. I’ve never seen a Romeo and Juliet adaptation go so hard into the exploitation qualities. It went so far as to reveal that Tromeo was the long lost brother of Juliet, and then they were fine with it and went on to live as husband and wife with children of their own. Everyone was okay with the incest. And that was after Cappy molested his daughter and attempted to rape her. It was a whole bunch of exploitation insanity in the way that only Troma could do.


Let’s go back, for a second, to Die in a Gunfight, another adaptation of Romeo and Juliet that modernized the material. Instead of going for the exploitation style of the Troma flick, it went more for a direct-to-video crime movie vibe. The Rathcarts and the Gibbons had a blood feud that began in an 1800s duel. Things would start to change in the modern day when Ben Gibbon and Mary Rathcart fell in love.

Die in a Gunfight didn’t stick completely to the Romeo and Juliet story. It took some of the basic elements and ran on its own. There were the two lovers from feuding families. That’s present in almost any adaptation in some way, since that’s the core of the story. There was the rival suitor vying for Mary’s love, much like Count Paris from Shakespeare’s original play. However, the adaptation made a big shift in structure. The five-act story was tossed aside for a standard three-act structure. The climax of the third act in the play was combined with the death scene of the final act to create something different. The tragedy was also removed.

I should mention that about Tromeo and Juliet, as well. The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet was not present. Tromeo survived to the end of the movie. Juliet survived to the end of the movie. In place of that tragedy was an action-packed climax where the two star-crossed lovers went toe-to-toe with Cappy Capulet because of his mistreatment of Juliet and, really, everyone in Tromaville. I think the movie was set in Tromaville. It was an all-out brawl to finish the movie instead of two teens suiciding for love. Lloyd Kaufman is just a guy looking for cheap thrills instead of tears, I guess.


Another re-interpretation of the Romeo and Juliet story came in the form of West Side Story. I haven’t seen the Spielberg version of the movie from last year, but I did see the 1961 film adaptation some years ago. There were two gangs in New York, the Jets and the Sharks, that were feuding with each other. There was a romance between someone associated with the Jets and someone associated with the Sharks. It would possibly bridge the gap between the feuding gangs.

West Side Story brought two elements to the table that set it apart from other Romeo and Juliet adaptations. First off, it was a musical. The movie was adapted from a stage musical that was framed by Romeo and Juliet. The songs from that stage musical made the trip to the big screen. Second, there was an underlying story about race relations in New York City. The Jets were composed of white people while the Sharks were composed of Puerto Ricans. The story was somewhat hampered by the use of makeup to have some white people playing Latin roles. It was still a somewhat forward-looking movie, which was something.

Tromeo and Juliet didn’t attempt anything more than schlock and shock. It wasn’t a commentary on anything in the United States. It didn’t tackle race relations like West Side Story. It was pure exploitation instead, touching upon incest and the porn industry as plot points. Tromeo was even originally envisioned as being a crack dealer. There was no nuance to the storytelling. It was simply meant to get a rise out of people, whether that be entertainment or anger. But then the question is, what else would you expect from Troma? They made Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead. Although that movie was filled with satire of the fast-food industry, it was also filled with nudity, violence, and swearing. Basically, all the things Lloyd Kaufman likes in his movies.


One other Romeo and Juliet re-imagining I want to discuss is a little movie called Warm Bodies. This one removed the warring families or warring gangs aspect and replaced it with the zombie apocalypse. One side of the conflict was humans. The other side was the shambling corpses that we all have come to know and fear. One human and one zombie found a connection that crossed the boundaries of their conflict and turned into love. It also gave the zombies back their humanity, causing the conflict to come to a peaceful resolution.

Warm Bodies was a true modern re-imagining of the Romeo and Juliet story. It took the elements of forbidden romance and feuding families and placed them into a zombie apocalypse. Monsters were popular at that time with zombies, vampires, and werewolves having a major resurgence in the cultural conscience. The other way that it modernized the story was to turn it into a young adult tale. The 2000s and 2010s were filled with young adult stories set in magical worlds, dystopias, and such settings. Warm Bodies fit right in alongside Harry Potter, Twilight, Percy Jackson, and The Hunger Games. Those two things together made the classic romantic tragedy into a modern flick.

Tromeo and Juliet didn’t quite reimagine Romeo and Juliet in that way. That was partially due to how the script was written. The original intention was to tell the story in iambic pentameter. That would make it feel much like any of Shakespeare’s plays, which were written in the same form. The other issue was the schlock of Troma’s films. Lloyd Kaufman was living in the grindhouse, exploitation world of the 60s and 70s, only with updated violence and nudity. Though that was a modern update of Shakespeare, it still felt like the past because of the tone.


There have been various adaptations of Shakespeare plays over the years that have put a modern spin on what people consider to be classic material. Romeo and Juliet happens to be one of the most popular for filmmakers to pull from. They pull from the romance and pull from the tragedy. Or they don’t pull from the tragedy, since audiences tend to prefer happy endings. They keep the forbidden romance part and the feuding sides part of the story. It’s just with a twist. Tromeo and Juliet, Die in a Gunfight, West Side Story, and Warm Bodies all did it. And they all came up with different ways to do it.

If it weren’t for reading those four Shakespeare plays in high school, I might not notice the intricacies in the various adaptations of them. I’ve seen people do Macbeth in a few ways. I’ve seen a modern interpretation of The Merchant of Venice. I even saw a television movie version of King Lear that was a western. Obviously, I’ve seen a bunch of Romeo and Juliet adaptations, too. They aren’t the only Shakespeare adaptations, either. Knowing those four through reading them was only the beginning. I’ve learned about other plays like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello, Hamlet, The Taming of the Shrew, and any of the plays Shakespeare made about kings. I’ve seen adaptations of those, some modernized, some not so much. All of them standing on their own in some way. All beginning with being forced to read four plays in high school.

I’m sure most of us shared that experience. We went high school. A major part of the literature curriculum was to spend a month or so going through a Shakespeare play. Maybe you would have to do a presentation of a scene from one of them. Maybe you had to write a soliloquy in the style of Shakespeare. Or you just read them aloud as a class. Either way, we all know Shakespeare and at least some of his work. We’ve probably seen some of it, too.  That’s just life, you know?


Let’s get a few notes in here:

Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)