I can picture filmmaker Braden Sitter Sr. watching the news and becoming sidetracked by the ticker scrolling across the bottom of the screen. I can also picture the filmmaker getting lost down a rabbit hole of ridiculous clickbait articles on social media. This isn’t a knock against Braden because a movie as off-the-wall as his unauthorized comedy The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man needs sheer mischievous curiousity to make it work, and there’s no shortage of it in this indie.

The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man is an embellished and hypothetical account of a strange news story from 2019. A man, wearing a yellow construction hardhat, was caught drenching people with a bucket of human waste on three separate occasions around university campuses in Toronto, Ontario. After the suspect was detained, the story faded away, but not for writer/director Braden Sitter Sr. The movie attempts to fill in details around this stinky story. The film doesn’t condone the behaviour or suggest that giving strangers an unsanitary shower is a good idea. However, what writer/director Sitter Sr. illustrates rather well is how big city culture and its own self-sustaining communities function within a vacuum.

Lonely wallflowers in the audience may empathize with Miguel (Rishi Rodriguez). A paranoid loner, Miguel struggles to muster enough confidence to speak to his mother on the phone or to keep a consistent job. His most recent gig is a fleeting opportunity help advertise for Toronto cinephile Reg Hartt, but Miguel’s hostile personality sours the deal. Hart plays himself with his tongue firmly in cheek. It’s the most inspired “inside baseball” bit of casting since Frank D’Angelo portrayed an acting coach in The Last Porno Show.

The fogginess of The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man begins with Miguel’s motivations. Sitter Sr. plays the middle and alternates between the loner’s disdain towards Toronto and a possible undiagnosed mental illness. While I’m grateful the filmmaker didn’t lean on the latter as a failsafe reason, the film is lacking firm commitment to its lead character. As rote as venting about society may be (ala Falling Down, God Bless America, or HITS), this personal stewing would’ve provided more of a breaking point for Miguel. Instead, Miguel has an epiphany, an amusing re-birth, and kicks off his dookie extravaganza. While Miguel perceives himself as an anti-hero (in the same vein as Joker), Braden Sitter Sr. presents him an an annoying super-villain – his only power is inconveniencing random people and forcing his victims to bathe immediately.

The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man is one-half experimental arthouse indie and one-half absurdist slapstick comedy. Frenetically edited video representing Miguel’s hyperactive personality are then countered with slow-motion clips of people being dumped by a dump. The attacks are usually accompanied by funny song parodies, tunes that have been re-imagined to be about the contents of a used toilet. The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man has the cleverness of “Weird Al” Yankovich and the filthiness of GG Allin.

Almost as if Sitter Sr. took notes from David Gordon Green’s Halloween series, the movie shifts its focus on Torontonians who are trying to live their lives with a poo-flinging maniac running amok. While these scenes may seem like inconsequential short films, these straight-faced vignettes do a good job of emulating passive-aggressive coping methods by indifferent people. This point is driven home further when the production uses hidden cameras to catch real apathetic reactions by witnesses. However, the most interesting turnaround is between a self-indulgent poet (Paul Bellini of The Kids in the Hall) and his aggravated friend (Neal Armstrong), who go from being irritated by each other to having a closer bond when one of them becomes covered in ca-ca. I wish there were more of these exchanges around the city. Porch Stories, but covered in crap.

The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man eventually paints itself into a corner by getting lost in Miguel’s alter-ego. The film is framed as a flashback, taking place in a grungy and moist motel room as Miguel spills the beans to a concerned and confused journalist (played by Spencer Rice of Kenny vs. Spenny fame). This set-up is promising, but the conclusion flies off the rails and becomes too hard to follow. But as flawed as the final third is, Braden Sitter Sr. connects this unbelievable story in a way that reminds us that no matter how wild a news story may be, it’s surprisingly trivial in the grand scheme of a metropolis.

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Addison Wylie: @AddisonWylie