Sugar Rot

Sweetie. Sugar. Honey. Muffin. The English language is full of terms used to describe women as if they were snacks, their primary purpose to give pleasure to others, even if they feel their own identities being eaten away in the process. Becca Kozak’s schlocky and sticky Fantasia hit takes these popular metaphors and renders them literal.

Chloë MacLeod, who could also be seen at the festival in the very different identity-related feature Foreigner, plays Candy, a young woman who works in an ice cream parlour, where she is frequently harassed by male customers. One day, a sleazy ice cream truck driver who says he’s been watching her since she was a child takes it further. The rape scene is over quickly, too camp to be particularly distressing, just sufficient to show the patheticness of the act. Candy tries to get on with life as normal, but that’s not easy. Firstly, she’s pregnant. Secondly, she’s not sure that the thing in her womb is human. Thirdly, she’s turning into ice cream.

Whatever else you may think of this film, it has to be acknowledged that MacLeod is a trooper. Rather than getting into more complicated special effects, Kozak simply used real ice cream throughout, and the actor spent much of the shoot covered in it, sticky and freezing. Candy’s look of misery in later scenes is real. Although there are occasional sequences involving fake blood and tissue, most of the gore is, one way or another, conveyed through the medium of sweets, which take the place of a variety of body parts. There is a scene involving a jelly bean which has provoked visceral reactions in audience members, though no real violence occurs.

In order to cope with the loss of body parts due to melting and other people’s appetites, Candy has to gorge herself on sweet things at frequent intervals, which the people around her dismiss as pregnancy craving. She doesn’t want to have a baby, but can’t find a doctor willing to perform an abortion – except, perhaps, for her best friend’s creepy husband, Dr Herscell Gordon, a gynaecologist and plastic surgeon who makes his approach clear early on with a curt “Stop screaming. This doesn’t hurt.” The trouble is, once he’s had a taste of Candy, he wants something more.

There’s not a great deal more to it. Subplots involve Dr Gordon’s wife – who happens to be Candy’s best friend – and her longing for the baby; plus Candy’s troubled relationship with her resentful mother. There’s a lot of comment on the misery of socially obligatory motherhood, pregnancy and eating disorders. Candy is repeatedly criticised for being fat by people who don’t seem to think she’s miserable enough. Her junkie boyfriend Sid (Drew Forster) assures her that she’s still desirable, but does he want her, or just her body? Nobody seems to care that she’s disintegrating.

Made on a very low budget, the film looks a little scrappy in places and not all the acting hits the mark, but there’s an enthusiasm to it that makes it easy to forgive. Cracking lines like “I got the results of your blood work. It seems your arteries are full of ice cream,”easily make up for the stilted ones and the occasional issues with pacing. Whenever things seem to be straying too far over the top, a misogynistic comment or a reference to religion will come along to remind us that, dairy-themed transformations aside, this world isn’t all that much more absurd that the one we live in.

Sugar Rot is a lot of fun, and B –movie lovers should dig in.

Reviewed on: 05 Aug 2025