Meet the Deedles (1998)
Director: Steve Boyum Cast: Paul Walker, Steve Van Wormer, A.J. Langer, John Ashton, Dennis Hopper, Robert Englund Screenplay: James Herzfeld Producers: Aaron Meyerson, Dale Pollock Runtime: 90 US Distribution: Disney Rated PG: toilet humor
By Nathaniel R. Atcheson (nate@pyramid.net)
Perhaps the most disturbing thing about a film as painfully awful as Meet the Deedles is that there are people in this world who thought conscious members of the human race would enjoy it. I typically don't find low humor entertaining, but I can tell when it's been done with a little bit of intelligence. Meet the Deedles is not intelligent, nor is it funny, entertaining, or bearable in even the loosest sense of the word.
See, it's about these two brothers, Stuart and Phil Deedle (Paul Walker and Steve Van Wormer). They're a couple of surf bums who live in Hawaii with their rich father. One day, they get kicked out of school for missing a day, so their father sends them away to a camp in Wyoming to make men out of them.
But wait, all of this setup is useless, because when they get to Wyoming, there's a big mountain man-looking fellow there who claims that the camp was his but that the government took it away from him. So, after an elaborate escape from him, the Deedles end up taking a couple of women's clothes to wear; at this point, they skateboard down the mountain and crash land in the offices of Yellowstone park, where they are subsequently mistaken for the two women whose clothes they stole. They are recruited to be park rangers-in-training, and their job is to solve the prairie dog problem that is consuming the entire park.
See, the prairie dogs are present because a psycho (Dennis Hopper) hates the head park ranger (John Ashton) and wants to make him look bad by destroying Old Faithful (a geyser). Somebody sat down at their computer one day and said, "I think I'll write a brainless movie about a couple of surfers who go to camp, but then go to be park rangers." Meet the Deedles is the product of this line of thinking.
The film starts off terrible, with the brothers getting pulled out of bed on their birthday and then being forced by a bunch of friends to parasail. But, when the school police man (the school police in Hawaii apparently use boats) tracks them down, they outsmart him by flying over him and making him wipe out. This moment is poorly filmed and boring, and pointless, and it's hard to do the stupidity of the stunt justice in words: it needs to be seen.
The whole film, really, is as bad. It never let up, and it never got funny. The film also resorts to toilet humor, which I never like in any situation. Feces and flatulence should be reserved for . . . anything other than movies. The toilet humor makes its way into this film because the Deedles use a high-powered laxative to get the prairie dogs out, but it's in gas form so it goes into the air where birds can breath it, and then quickly dump their waste on the head park ranger.
Walker and Van Wormer are innocuous, and I can at least say that they are not to blame for this heinous disaster. They play their character-less characters competently, but the material is just too awful to accept. A.J. Langer, whom I like, manages to make her lines sound good, but she is wasted. And Dennis Hopper, as I'm sure you can imagine, doesn't give his all as this particular psycho.
I'm trying to think . . . I know there was one thing I laughed at in the movie. Well, I can't remember. I do remember, however, that writer James Herzfeld throws in a lot of jokes that only adults who keep up on current events would understand. Too bad they aren't funny, but that's not the real problem--the target audience for Meet the Deedles are boys between ten and thirteen (I'm guessing). There were two kids sitting in front of me in the film, and they were squirming silently the entire film. Two guys my age were behind me, and they expressed their distaste after the film was over. The only guy laughing also found the bird feces funny, so he doesn't count.
I thought Disney used to make good films. The last three I've seen from them--Krippendorf's Tribe, Flubber, and now Meet the Deedles--are all bad films. But they aren't just bad: they're offensive, audience-insulting garbage. Meet the Deedles is a film that should appeal to no one. It lacks even a hint of the self-consciousness that is required for a stupid film to simultaneously be funny and at least somewhat intelligent. And, as I said, intelligence is not one of its strong points.
1/2* out of **** (1/10, F)
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Nathaniel R. Atcheson
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