Director Quentin Dupieux’s tokusatsu satire Smoking Causes Coughing is part Power Rangers, part Creepshow, and one of the funniest, most absurd comedies of 2023. Now in theaters and available for home streaming on digital platforms.
Just minutes into Quentin Dupieux’s Smoking Causes Coughing, it becomes obvious that something isn’t right about its team of faux Power Rangers. The five-person superhero group, known as Tobacco Force, dispatches a hulking rubber turtle monster by shooting it with a concentrated stream of cigarette smoke, giving the beast such an awful case of cancer that it explodes in a long, lingering spread of gore. Drenched in the kaiju’s greasy blood and guts, Tobacco Force celebrates another win. It looks like just another day at the office — in this case, an empty quarry, the ideal filming location for spandex-clad kung-fu antics and explosions.
The five members of Tobacco Force, all named after elements of cigarette smoke — Benzene, Nicotine, Ammonia, Mercury, and Methanol — promptly report back to their boss, Chief Didier. He turns out to be a ratlike puppet that looks like a cigarette left unchecked and burning down to ash, and he’s constantly drooling green goo on himself. It’s suddenly dreadfully clear that Dupieux has dressed up an absurdist comedy in the costume of a tokusatsu superhero series. Further underscoring that absurdity: One Tobacco Force member has a painfully unrequited crush on this womanizing, slobbering, red-eyed rat thing.
It only gets weirder from there.
Smoking Causes Coughing is masked as a send-up of superhero shows like Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and Kamen Rider, with a monster-of-the-week bad guy and a looming intergalactic threat.
