The campy box art belies a black comedy so weird that it feels like it’s set on its own planet. This movie is out to lunch at dinnertime. There’s not much writing out there about it, but if I had to guess its inspiration, I’d say that writer/director Mikel B. Anderson (who’d go on to a long stint working on The Simpsons) maybe saw one too many funny T-shirt slogans one day. He began to see surrealism in people walking around with messages displayed on their chests. From there, Anderson thought about the factories that make the shirts and zeroed on the character of a depressed designer in the midst of losing his marbles. He’s one of the few people in the film who doesn’t wear a funny T-shirt (he wears a camouflage shirt because I guess he’s a man who’d like to hide). Among the memorable gags here include T-shirt images that change in mid-scene as a character’s mood changes and a dream sequence in which a surgeon slices open a patient and pulls out their organs, which are depicted as T-shirts with things like a rib cage and a heart printed on it. There’s not a single normal person in the film. They show character partly through their shirts (my favorite: a guy who wears a shirt that simply says “I Have Herpes”). Meanwhile, Mikel B. Anderson tells us a little something about his influence here in the party scene where a guy dances in an Eraserhead shirt.
Never released to DVD, this movie sits in the VHS-only club as of this writing.