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STUDIO: Lionsgate
MSRP: $28.98
RATED: PG-13
RUNNING TIME: 89 minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• Behind the scenes conversation with Danny Trejo
• Director’s commentary
• Featurettes
• Trailers
The Pitch
As the blood red moon smears its crimson light across the darkened sky, a shrill cry rings out from the mewing lamb sacrificed upon the altar. The jagged dagger pierces its throat with effortless precision and the boiling blood trickles down upon the grooves of the stone pentagram. The sacrifice complete, the hellmouth opens and Satan is free to unleash his wrath upon the world. It is through his divine rage that Delta Farce takes physical form and is made available in Wal-Marts throughout America.
The Humans
No one with an ounce of human dignity left within them. Larry the Cable Guy, Bill Engvall, DJ Qualls, Keith David, and Danny Trejo.
In pursuit of the elusive Randy Savage.
The Nutshell
Larry the Cable Guy plays a guy named Larry who works at a country restaurant. Bill Engvall plays a guy named Bill who has an overbearing wife. DJ Qualls plays a squirrelly looking dipshit without muscle tone. The three of them are part of the Army reserve and enjoy their one weekend a month down at the base where they watch football games and eat Slim Jims. The military is in need of warm bodies to send to their deaths in Iraq. The man in charge of deployment is very wise and determines that Larry, Bill and DJ Qualls need to die. Thus, the weekend warriors are shipped to Iraq
Or not! You see, on the plane ride over to Iraq, the pilots hit turbulence and have to dump some of the cargo in order to stay in the air. They drop a humvee that the three stooges were sleeping in. The intrepid trio awakens to find themselves in what they think is Iraq, but what is actually Mexico! Since the characters are retarded, they just figure that Iraqi civilians regularly eat tacos and beat piñatas. Their attempts to “liberate” the town result in them crossing a very powerful Mexican gang lord and starting a small war. Unfortunately, they are not captured and beheaded by the Mexican terrorists. Instead, the entire plot of Three Amigos is ripped off wholesale.
You were in Road Trip. Can’t you afford to upgrade to a RealDoll?
The Lowdown
It’s difficult to say something positive about Delta Farce. It’s easier to make a case for Hitler being an alright guy, Rob Zombie being a good director or Carlos Mencia being a creative genius. At the end of the day, the best thing that can be said about Delta Farce is that its huge supply of fart jokes narrowly outnumbers its supply of gay jokes. Outside of that backhanded compliment, Delta Farce is cinematic AIDS. Watching it will obliterate your cinematic immune system and leave you defenseless. If you watch Delta Farce and Larry The Cable Guy: Health Inspector back to back, you will die. This is fact.
The jokes in Delta Farce are so clichéd that even audiences in the early 1900s would roll their eyes at them just as soon as they got done running away from the scary trains on the screen. The jokes in Delta Farce are so bad that they make one question the definition of “joke.” The gags certainly meet the traditional structures of jokes. One moronic character sets up the joke and the other rings home the punch line. If you can literally say the punch line thirty seconds before the characters on the screen, something is dreadfully wrong.
Somehow, someway, the people responsible for Delta Farce have mapped the joke genome and found a way to remove humor from its DNA. Every joke is so consistently bad that it’s impossible to believe someone wrote this film and thought any of it was funny. Someone had to deliberately set out to make this movie impossibly devoid of humor. It’s the only explanation that my brain can accept. If I were to believe for one second that this movie was supposed to make me laugh, I would go insane and start driving around the entire American south, killing every person I saw wearing a hip hop Looney Tunes T-shirt and a Dale Earnhardt hat.
Heroic children try in vain to stop the delivery of the Delta Farce script to movie executives.
Larry the Cable Guy has to be some sort of mad genius with a membership in MENSA. All of his work is just part of the world’s most elaborate sociological experiment. When he finally publishes his research in a scholarly journal discussing the thought processes of inbreds, maybe the academic community will finally embrace him. Until then, he will just have to keep up the ruse by being one of the most unappealing lead actors to ever appear in a film.
Marisol Nichols has to kiss Larry the Cable Guy. She has to play the love interested for LARRY THE CABLE GUY. Who cares if she was terrible on 24? No human being has ever done a crime so severe as to be condemned to playing Larry’s love interest. Just imagine being in love with Larry the Cable Guy. Pretend to love him, if only for a second. Now go take a shower you disgusting piece of filth.
Some directors worship at the altars of their favorite auteur and try to live up to their legacies. Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola, Goddard. All directors that up and comers look to for guidance and inspiration. Not C. B. Harding. From the looks of Delta Farce, Harding obviously considers John R. Cherry to be the greatest visionary in cinema. It’s clear that Harding learned everything he knows about directing from watching all of the Ernest movies back to back. How else to explain the skill-less, disjointed, freakishly unsubtle quality of his work? If you take a drink for every time Harding uses a wipe to transition between scenes, you’d be dead of alcohol poisoning before Larry even gets to say “Git R Dun.” Take two drinks for each time the wipe is accompanied by a swooshing sound.
I love the smell of a spit cup in the morning. GIT-R-DUN!
Speaking of the requisite “Git R Dun” scene, it’s truly the one part when Harding’s directing prowess gets demonstrated in full force. As the boys finish suiting up and loading their guns to go shoot Mexicans, Larry around and squints while the camera zooms in on his cherubic face. With that dramatic zoom and a sweeping score, Larry unleashes his trademark catch phrase to the delight of millions. Then he’s gone, consumed in another wipe transition. The moment, like the catch phrase, is gone.
It was a brilliant decision by Harding to hold off the one “Git R Dun” of the film until around the thirty minute mark. The audience is clearly waiting for it and Harding teases us a little, holding the catchphrase in front of us like a carrot. Thankfully, Harding is a generous man and doesn’t make us wait too long for Larry’s phrase; otherwise we might start getting angry at the film and riot in the theaters.
People could write tomes on how bad this movie is at every level. Everyone involved with it deserves to be held accountable by a war crimes tribunal. Danny Trejo deserves to be sent back to San Quentin. Bill Engvall should be strapped to a rocket and fired into the sun. The pain he feels as his flesh is melted by the atmosphere is nothing compared to the pain audiences feel when watching his fart jokes. DJ Qualls looking like DJ Qualls seems like it should be punishment enough, but a punch to the face wouldn’t hurt.
Buddy, you have no idea.
Delta Farce is either one of the worst mainstream comedies to ever be produced or the most brilliant practical joke ever devised. The film made eight million dollars in the US and is sure to make more on DVD. I hope the producers of the film are counting their money and laughing at the joke they pulled on America. They’ll be the only ones laughing at anything related to Delta Farce.
The Package
Delta Farce is presented in a fantastic plastic clamshell case that makes it easy to pick up and throw in the trash can. If you wish, you may also display the DVD case in your home to inform all your friends that you have no taste and they should never ask for your opinion on anything. You may also carry Delta Farce on your person for protection. If threatened by a mugger or a scoundrel, pull out the Delta Farce DVD and point it towards your attacker. Threaten to make them watch it and feel safe as they run for cover.
If you wish to know what goes on in the minds of the people behind Delta Farce, you can also put the disc into a DVD player and watch some special features. The director’s commentary is particularly enlightening. I was personally shocked to learn that this film actually had multiple takes for certain scenes. If the scenes on the screen are the good takes, I shudder to think of what the bad takes look like. It would probably tear my mind asunder. Harding heaps tons of praise on everyone in the production and loves his film, proving that he’s in on the joke as well. Either that or he has an extra chromosome or two. Sadly, the failure of this movie means he’ll probably just have to go back to filming the Blue Collar Comedy Tour movies.
Singing Danny Trejo screamed in terror as the screen wipe descended upon him.
One special feature is just a five minute conversation with Danny Trejo, the lead villain of the film. His crowning moment in the film is singing “I Will Survive” before a packed house of thugs. Someone on the set had the bright idea of just turning on a camera and pointing it at Trejo. The result is the only redeeming thing on the entire disc. Trejo basically tells his life story, from his humble upbringing to his imprisonment to teaching Eric Roberts how to box. If the producers of the film had just pointed the camera at Trejo for 90 minutes, maybe they would have produced something besides cinematic afterbirth. Pointing the camera at a blank piece of paper would have produced a better movie though, so it’s kind of a moot point.
The rest of the special features are just the usual smattering of behind the scenes looks and promotional material. The previews section features the trailers for Good Luck Chuck and Waiting, forcing one to decide which actor they hate more: Larry the Cable Guy or Dane Cook. It’s a debate that threatens to divide nations and pit brother against brother.
0.0 if human beings were supposed to laugh at it.