Writer/director Fruit Chan is completely around the u-bend about lavatories. It's an unhealthy obsession, at least, for those that have to sit through this. In a confusing, multi-threaded story that takes us around the world we see how in Beijing people crap together; in India it's quite normal to pee up against a wall in the street; and in New York a toilet is the scene of a bloody hit.

Chan litters the film with toilet references. The protagonist Dong Dong was born in a public toilet, which led to him being given the ironic nickname "God of The Toilets". At age eighteen, he's now faced with the imminent death of his grandmother who found him and raised him. Meanwhile, his best friend, Tony, is about to leave town to find a miracle cure for his sick brother.

In another surreal strand of the film a girl comes out of the sea - she claims to be some type of mermaid, although we don't see any fins - to live in a portaloo in Pusan. Another character who is laid out flat in hospital with a terminal illness (death is another of Chan's preoccupations) has to crap through a hole in his bed, while another sickly character needs help going to the toilet on the train.

Funnily enough, sex doesn't come into the picture. But Chan takes every chance to return to his scatalogical theme whether it be two old men discussing a legendry physician of stools, a submerged camera following the cloudy water as the excreta is flushed away, or a brand new toilet bowl that appears incongrously above a crowd of heads in a street scene.

Chan does succeed in breaking the tedium from time to time with witty visual jokes of the yuck kind. But these do not make up for the rambling sequence of events, rendered utterly confusing by his unusual fixation. The filmmakers may have had fun making this - something you can't say about watching it.