'Martin & Orloff' filled with inspired craziness

January 16, 2004

BY DAREL JEVENS STAFF REPORTER

Since leaving for Manhattan eight years ago, Ian Roberts and Matt Walsh have been sprinkling their Chicago-learned improv skills all over show business.

Their series "Upright Citizens Brigade" confused and amused people for three seasons on Comedy Central. Their theater of the same name preaches the gospel according to Del Close to hundreds of New York actors. And they've even landed a few commercials and movies, Robert bossing around cheerleaders in "Bring It On," Walsh managing to pop up in both the season's sweetest Christmas movie ("Elf") and its sickest ("Bad Santa").

But when it comes to the big screen, the duo's true passion is "Martin & Orloff," a no-budget comedy they wrote (with Roberts' wife, Katie) and shot over 27 days a few years ago. After a few film festival showings, the project is crawling across the country and arrives today for a weeklong run at the Music Box.

"Martin & Orloff" has a tone instantly familiar to viewers of the "UCB" TV show, a collection of intertwined sketches that tended to be edgy without turning crass, ridiculous but not inscrutable, and dirty while just short of cheap. The alarming first scene finds Martin Flam (Roberts, a handsome guy looking wan and withered here) alone in his apartment, trudging to the bathroom to wipe up huge, awful, crimson splashes of his own blood. It seems he'd tried to slit his wrists a while back and has just returned from the institutionalization that followed. "I'm really glad you didn't kill yourself," says the well-meaning receptionist at work.

This guy needs good psychiatric help. But instead he's sent to Dr. Orloff (Walsh), a blowhard jerk who works out of a fire station. A couple awkward minutes into their first session, Orloff suddenly remembers ("My mind is an idiot!") that he has a more pressing engagement: a softball game. So he drags Martin along, and thus begins the patient's immersion into the shrink's perverse existence.

Over the next day or two, the doc treats Martin to encounters with a grotesquely burned hot-dog vendor, a strip club renowned for its sweet-potato pie, a bad play mocking suicidal people at (inside joke alert) the Candlelight Dinner Playhouse and a pal (Jon Benjamin) whose habit of using sinks as toilets Orloff explains away with, "He fought in Desert Storm." As Orloff insists they're becoming friends, Martin protests, "This has been more like a kidnapping!" But a few times Martin has the chance to run away, and he opts not to.

The movie is full of funny people in supporting roles, including fellow UCB members Amy Poehler as a nut rebounding from a relationship with a well-endowed, 500-pound lineman (wrestler Sal Valente) and Matt Besser as Martin's ruthless boss. David Cross, Andy Richter, Janeane Garofalo, Rachel Dratch and Tina Fey stop by. And Kim Raver of "Third Watch" lightens up as a stripper/psychiatric student Orloff romances by alternately begging for sex and grousing about her vestigial anthropological nesting instincts.

"Martin & Orloff" doesn't have anything resembling a point, or a heart. It's just a carefully thought out attempt to get laughs by any means possible -- parody, absurdity, gratuitous use of strobe light. It works more often than not. By the time the end nears, and you're watching a hypnotized mental patient battle kung-fu henchmen as Girl Scouts in sparerib costumes try to cross a rickety bridge overhead, you're delighted to understand exactly how you got there. And that's accomplishment enough.