Are you seriously trying to tell me that there are people in this world that like this movie? I find that all but impossible to fathom. I've seen low-budget films with lasting value that far surpassed that of major studio productions. I've watched Asylum flicks that were surprisingly good. Camp and kitsch have their place in cinema, and I adore the utmost deliberate trash of John Waters, a man I'd unflinchingly name alongside David Lynch and Kurosawa Akira as one of my favorite filmmakers. With even just a modicum of wit attached, spoofs, parodies, satires, farces, and the most outrageous, outwardly random, and nonsensical of comedy can be tremendously funny. 'When nature calls,' unfortunately, cannot be described with any such verbiage. This is one of the worst things I've ever watched.
In unpredictably irregular, hopelessly scattered, and uniformly fleeting instances, there are little tidbits that demonstrate a sliver of cleverness. Sadly, with a single exception these are insufficient to earn a laugh - or with a single exception, even just a smile - for filmmaker Charles Kaufman and most everyone else involved lacked the skill and intelligence to fashion even the best of ideas into something thoughtful and cogent. It's a minor pleasure to see Gates MacFadden here, for example, and not least as she gets to exercise her craft as a choreographer, but she's present only for a throwaway skit that's intended for other purposes in the first place. That's pretty much the way it goes for any would-be joke that comes closest to evoking a response: a glimmer of wit is momentarily discerned, but gone just as quickly, or utilized poorly, and otherwise surrounded by too much balderdash to count for anything. And gosh golly, there's a lot of balderdash here.
I don't even mean writing that has aged poorly in the past forty years (e.g., racism, sexism, homophobia, fatphobia, and even a rape joke), though of course these are insufferable as well. Rather, there's a lot of these agonizingly long eighty-five minutes that are just cheap, common, simple-minded, juvenile, and/or puerile, including tiresome sex or anatomy jokes and scatological humor. There's a lot that Kaufman or someone else seemingly supposed was clever, but it really wasn't, except maybe for eight-year old children who shouldn't be watching a Troma feature to begin with; on the opposite end of the spectrum, there's some referential humor that is meaningless four decades later. There's far more that's pure randomness for its own sake, with no rhyme or reason to connect thoughts together, and somehow that randomness is intended to provide amusement. It doesn't. Have I mentioned sight gags which are so poorly visualized that the audience doesn't even have an opportunity to see what the picture intends?
With that latter point in mind I can't even say that 'When nature calls' is consistently well made, because the editing and cinematography sometimes leave something to be desired. I won't fault things like the sets, costume design, stunts, effects, or props for struggling with limited resources, but I will fault them for being approached carelessly. The sound and image quality is variable; sound effects and music are employed to ends as exhausting and as tawdry as anything else here. I guess we can say the cast give committed performances, but not all the acting is equal, and anyway I'm unsure why we should care about it when everything else is so rotten. And still we come back to the writing, and Kaufman's realization as director, because the vast preponderance of the humor fails spectacularly. Strictly speaking it's still true that I've seen worse titles, but not many. Whatever your impetus for watching, whatever it is you think you're going to get out of this, I must vehemently recommend finding anything else instead. 'When nature calls' is a dull, boorish dud, and it's simply not worth anyone's time.
