I think that Lloyd Kaufman is a good director, and no, I haven’t recently suffered a severe head injury. He’s funny and great at putting barely contained chaos on screen. In a Kaufman film, there are often gags in the foreground, in the background, in the center of the frame and on the sides all at the same time, like a packed Jack Davis comic strip panel in Mad Magazine. That’s one of his signatures, along with a low budget, actors who play it broad, a subversive anti-corporate (as well as anti-authority) bent and a taste for tasteless jokes. Before Troma discovered their mascot and the power of blood and toxic waste and even more disgusting fluids squirting everywhere, their early in-house films (not counting the many independent films that they distributed) amounted to a series of freewheeling sex comedies that fire out jokes from a machine gun, not caring how bad, corny, old, stupid, bizarre or nonsensical they are. Kaufman gets a little better with each movie. Scenes don’t fall apart so quickly. A few performances take flight. The story contains something that almost resembles a dramatic point.
Stuck On You! might be the best of these early films. It’s dumb, offensive, ridiculous and rude and I laughed about a dozen times. It’s the story of an unmarried, live-in couple who are breaking up and suing each other for palimony. She’s an upwardly mobile future executive; he’s a lowly, but ambitious, worker in a giant chicken coop for an egg vendor. The judge in their case is the legendary Professor Irwin Corey (madcapping it up like only a comedian born in 1914 can), who’s really an angel given the job of keeping them together. While our couple tell their stories, Corey tells them stories of troubled relationships throughout history. Napoleon and Josephine, King Arthur and Guinevere, Leonardo da Vinci and Mona Lisa, etc.
Sounds cute and touching, right? Not in the hands of the Troma team, who pile on the gross-outs, weird sex and complete idiocy. What else do you need?