Before Troma’s reliable blood, beasts and breasts, Lloyd Kaufman was a goddamn art filmmaker. He asked big questions on a small budget. He skewered film conventions and played around with cinema verite and silent movie ideas. He was a neurotic New York Jewish kid in the early 1970s reacting to the hippies (he didn’t quite fit in) and reeling from both the French and American New Waves (he thought he did fit in). He filled his debut with kinetic editing, dream sequences and shaky reality. Kaufman takes the lead role here himself, stumbling and fumbling as a young man in the big city, where he can’t hold a job, has a crush on a coffee shop waitress he’s never met and sleeps on the floor of a boiler room or something.
His biggest dilemma, though: He can’t figure out how any of the stable, settled people around him got that way. Kaufman’s nebbish interviews a cross section of characters (in sepia-toned pseudo-documentary scenes that probably don’t take place in reality) to find out answers, but only ends up more confused as most of these people turn out to be similarly lost, if not outright loons themselves.
Kaufman’s writer-director-star triple threat invites Woody Allen comparisons in more ways than one. Imagine if Allen made his first film, Take the Money and Run, fueled mostly on bitterness and confusion, and with none of the sophisticated laugh-getting chops honed from writing for Sid Caesar and a stand-up act.
Allen later perfected his voice on Annie Hall and Kaufman perfected his on The Toxic Avenger. Now, that’s a team-up of characters that I’d like to see.