A few weeks back, your pals at the Screengrab did a list of Comebacks We’d Like To See, and one of the ladies on my wish list was Natasha Lyonne, who shone as a wised-up, enjoyably weird young character actress in movies like Slums of Beverly Hills, American Pie and, well, Freeway 2: Confessions of a Trick Baby before (alleged) drug problems knocked her life and career off track.

So I was happy to see Lyonne in fine form as a market testing guru pushing ominous “self-warming” cookies (with some pretty unnerving side effects) in David Russo’s peculiar conspiracy thriller/monster movie/existential freak-out The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle. Lyonne’s character, Tracy, is the sexy corporate fixation of the film’s appealing central protagonist, Dory (Marshall Allman), a spiritually confused naïf who flushes away his own corporate career with an ill-timed freak-out and winds up joining the invisible Morlocks responsible for cleaning the offices and toilets of the Eloi elite.

Dory’s fellow janitors are a party-hearty band of misfits, including motor-mouth wise-ass O.C. (Vince Vieluf, channeling Thomas Haden Church), sex-crazed rockers Ethyl and Methyl (Tania Raymonde and Tygh Runyan) and their laid-back transvestite boss, Weird William (Richard Lefebvre), and the movie is most enjoyable in the early scenes depicting the likable group’s nightly rituals of work and play.

Things get progressively more strange (and, frankly, less interesting) when the janitors become addicted to Lyonne’s cookies, which eventually cause strange blue creatures to burst from the sphincters of the men in the crew. Yes, that’s right: the film is about wriggling ass fish, not to mention male womb envy, corporate irresponsibility and, I suppose, the meaning of life (although, as I say, the whole thing gets a bit chaotic towards the end).

So is it worth seeing?  Well, I suppose: it’s certainly never dull, and for a movie so (necessarily) obsessed with toilet humor, the visuals are frequently beautiful. Unlike the annoying SXSW dud My Suicide, which piled meaningless digital effects on top of jump cuts on top of animation in a desperate attempt to seem innovative, Dizzle’s director stages his visual tricks with an artist’s eye...and the opening credits sequence alone -- involving a message in a bottle and an unexpected payoff -- is (almost) worth the price of admission.

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