Monday, March 21, 2016

Alone in the T-Shirt Zone (1986)

How bad is it? It's more weird than bad, but it's not great.
Should you see it? Sure (but it's hard to find).


Mike Anderson made this film before he started directing episodes of "The Simpsons" and obviously after seeing "Eraserhead," which gets referenced a couple of different ways. A guy lies comatose in a hospital after going insane while designing t-shirts. Though not particularly interesting, he's apparently irresistible to women and even his female doctor rapes him in his coma. There's flashbacks to how he got to where he is, most of which are somewhat surreal scenes involving t-shirts: people's emotional states and personalities are reflected in their shirt designs, some of which are amusing. The plot meanders and relies on unlikely coincidences - he goes to a party with a guy who turns out to be his girlfriend's father, for example. A memorable example of the weirdness is a surgery where t-shirts are pulled from a man's chest that have pictures of his organs on them. Anderson directed one other film, which I haven't seen, but this one shows him to be competent if unoriginal, even when making a film of pure weirdness.

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