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'Joe Dirt' wallows in gross-out humor
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"Joe Dirt," the latest of the gross-out fiascoes, plays like a compendium of the others.
Though all of these movies were in production and post-production at approximately the same time, they share so many jokes they're virtually indistinguishable.
A guy urinates publicly. Another ignites animal flatulence. An animal misbehaves on a human leg. Animals copulate. Vomit jokes abound. A dismemberment becomes the basis of a joke. The hero gets covered in excrement. He concludes at one point he has just had sex with his sister. There are astoundingly tasteless visual jokes involving testicles.
To this batch, "Joe Dirt" adds one of its own: a lengthy sequence in which Joe sees a blue meteorite land. For no imaginable reason he eats a meal off it, only to learn it's excrement.
In a woeful spoof of the cell pit sequence from "Silence of the Lambs," Joe gets involved with a mad cross-dresser who wants his skin.
Has Hollywood, the breeding ground for the gross-out series, lost its head in the quest for a big opening weekend? Where does the accountability begin?
David Spade, who co-wrote "Joe Dirt" with Fred Wolf, acts the title character, who is not obviously learning impaired but who, when abandoned at Grand Canyon June 13, 1979, at age 8, didn't know his surname or his home state.
Is that supposed to be funny, too?
How about the waist-long wig he wears because his skull has no top?
Joe, who ages from 18 to 23 during the "present" portion of the story, stumbles onto an abysmal L.A. show run by a Don Imus-Howard Stern wannabe named Zander Kelly (Dennis Miller).
Inexplicably over a period of several days, Zander listens to Joe tell the story of his life and the search for his parents (Fred Ward and Caroline Aaron in cameos).
The whole country seems to be riveted. (It was easier to understand that two people in the row in front of me jumped ship after 12 minutes.)
The media makes Joe a cover boy, dubbing him "America's Sweetheart."
Through all this, he is loved by country girl Brandy (Brittany Daniel), hated by her backwoods papa (Joe Don Baker in reduced circumstances, career-wise) and befriended by a naive fireworks salesman named Kicking Wing (Adam Beach) and a janitor named Clem (Christopher Walken at a career nadir).
Does someone want to explain the bit involving an urn of a dog's ashes, which Joe seals and takes with him? What's that about? Did the upshot get edited?
Will first-time film director Dennie Gordon someday disown "Joe Dirt"?
Will executive producer Adam Sandler do Spade a bigger favor next time by just saying no?
And how did Jaime Pressly, who plays the possible sister Jill, get into both "Joe Dirt" and "Tomcats"?
Has anyone ever had two worse movies released in less than two weeks? Does she need a better agent, better reading glasses or both?
Ed Blank is the Tribune-Review's film critic. He can be reached at (412) 854-5555 or eblank@tribweb.com.
