There’s a scene in The Treacherous where depraved King Yeonsan giggles as he paints two horses fucking. The horse penetration that is the lubed apple of his sex-obsessed eye is shown in a chaste flash. In Freddie Got Fingered Tom Green spots a flopping horse dick by the side of the road and hops out of his car to beat it off. Freddie Got Fingered better captures the push-pull of repulsion and enticement at the heart of degeneracy.

Freddie Got Fingered Vs. The Treacherous

While The Treacherous does slot in nicely alongside other bloated sex monsters like Caligula and Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom it fails to bring anything truly subversive to the eye. The biggest reason for this is The Treacherous’ utter reliance on the female body for its display of sexual horror. While women crack fruit between their legs, discuss the perfect pussy, fondle testicle stand-in tomatoes, and have their extremities variously tickled, smacked, and stamped, The Treacherous never feels as if it transgresses on real sexual taboos because the same sense of submission, violence, and menace is never exercised against men. Nor are men’s sexual appetites ever presented as anything but relentlessly tame. King Yeonsan’s predilections—supposedly the dark heart of depravity driving The Treacherous—never rise above lesbian scenarios that would seem tame in any American frat house.

The Treacherous Trailer

This is not to say that The Treacherous fails for being sexist. The actual plot revolves around a complicated revenge orchestrated by a loyal servant and a conniving butcher-cum-concubine. There are many meaty roles for women in The Treacherous and even the ranks of the objectified sex slaves are given layered motives of intrigue that parallel nicely with the royal court jostling between the mad king’s various sycophantic factions. Rather it’s that The Treacherous portrays itself as a gilded plunge into degenerate dissipation, but only works in the alphabet of feminized titillation. There is very little in The Treacherous to make men uncomfortable. All The Treacherous feels safe to show is female skin.

The Treacherous is beautifully directed and acted. The script offers up treats like a poetic ode a woman sings to her own vagina, alternately comparing it to persimmon, abalone, a rooster, and a toothless monk as she dips her body over the grinning face of a court stooge.

But maybe when Tom Green is better at making us feel depraved and sexually squeamish you haven’t really hit upon anything taboo at all.

The Treacherous screened at the 2015 Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas.