After ill-fated summer gigs caddying, waiting tables and selling nuclear vacuum cleaners door to door, four guys join fellow frat bro Max (Paul Reiser) in the moving business, in Odd Jobs. In less than 15 minutes, the lowbrow ’80s comedy offers almost everything we’ve come to expect from a lowbrow ’80s comedy: racial stereotypes, drug references, homophobia, syrupy saxophone music, zany sound effects and that surefire laff-grabber we now call sexual assault.
Essentially a showcase for stand-up comedians Reiser, Robert Townshend, Paul Provenza and Rick Overton — plus teenpic second-stringer Scott McGinnis (Secret Admirer, Making the Grade, et al.) — the movie is initially shapeless as one-time director Mark Story presents what is essentially a meandering series of setups for jokes not worth setting up, from a sheep-fucking redneck to a Elvis-wannabe trucker from whose rearview mirror hangs a lucky rabbit’s dick. These come courtesy of first-time writers Robert Conte and Peter Wortmann (who didn’t fare much better with their next one, the painful John Candy vehicle Who’s Harry Crumb?), but they do score with two pretty decent golf gags, which, to be fair, is two more than the whole of Caddyshack II.
Only in the second half, when Max and the boys start Maximum Moving (get it?), does Odd Jobs begin flirting with a plot, however flimsy, with a rival moving company involved in a car-theft ring. As a charisma-free Reiser (the same year as Aliens) tries to regain the heart of his girlfriend (Fletch Lives’ Julianne Phillips) from a douche named Spud (Richard Dean Anderson, then seen weekly as TV’s MacGyver), we also get fitness guru Jake Steinfeld playing jacks, would-be second daughter Eleanor Mondale in a nudity-free sex scene, radio host Don Imus and future supermodel Jill Goodacre in don’t-blink cameos, Provenza doing a cringeworthy Ebonics bit — riffing on Rice Krispies and Roots — at the Townshend family’s dinner table, and in an uncredited supporting part in all the slapstick-driven moving sequences, gravity! The sofa stuck in the stairwell is a metaphor for any viewer subjected to such prolonged stupidity. —Rod Lott