If there is to be a Spider-man, I suppose there has to be a Larry the Cable Guy.
They used to call these movies “programmers” or “potboilers” and they were used to fill seats between the big releases.
They usually starred hayseed comedians with hillbilly accents like The Hoosier Hot Shots or Ernest.
Anyone remember Ernest? (He was Jim Varney, a rubber faced television pitch man, who starred in a series of lowest common denominator comedies in the ‘90’s. Varney eventually went on to play Jed Clampett in the 1993 feature The Beverly Hillbillies).
The films are usually belched out of the Hollywood production machine for miniscule budgets and, like many low-budget comedies and horror films, often generate respectable profits on the investment.
The inheritor of the corn-pone crown is Larry the Cable Guy (Daniel Lawrence Whitney). His last film ‘Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector’ made some $16 million on an investment of $4 million.
In ‘Delta Farce,’ Larry along with his weekend trailer-park drinking buddies, Bill (Bill Engvall – a member of Larry’s Blue Collar Comedy troupe) and Everett (DJ Qualls) have a sweet deal hanging out as reservists once a month and pretending to be citizen-soldiers. (When it’s time to chow down they’re off to Hooters).
With men desperately needed in Iraq, the bone-headed trio are suddenly activated, go through a weekend of boot camp and put under the command of your basic, sadistic, standard Hollywood-issue Sergeant Kilgore (Keith David).
The Sergeant is there to yell a lot and later to be constantly embarrassed by dressing in a crimson peignoir and becoming the butt of numerous gay jokes.
‘Delta Farce,’ like all films of this ilk, relies heavily on fart, bodily function and gay jokes.
When Larry catches Bill and Everett with their arms around each other sleeping in the back of a Humvee, he comments, “What in the name of Siegfried and Roy are you fellas doing?
Says Bill: “Don't ask.”
Says Everett: “Don't tell”
The semi-racist stereotypical characterizations, gay jokes and gross outs keep coming but the film is so flimsy it’s hard to take much exception to them.
On the flight to Iraq, the three fall asleep in the Humvee and are dumped when the aircraft runs into a ferocious storm. They awake the next morning in (get this) darkest Mexico, which they think is Iraq. They liberate a Mexican village in the hands of local thugs (headed by that durable, all-purpose Mexican baddie Danny Trejo) and are cheered as heroes. As always Trejo is great fun to watch and gamely goes along with the gags, such as they are. (His character’s name is Carlos Santana – get it? Like the guitarist? - which leads to all sorts of merriment).
I don’t think I should go on any further, I think you get the drift.
The humor runs to Qualls, a skinny little guy with macho pretentious, asking the confused Mexicans if they are “turds or shitittes.” (Hee! Hee!). The Sergeant drinks out of a water bottle that Everett has urinated into. (Ho! Ho!) The banditos are into karaoke. (Haw! Haw!)
The beefy, no-neck Larry also has an unbelievable beauty-and-the-beast romance with the lustrous American-Latino actress Marisol Nichols.
Delta Farce is a film that will appeal to a certain, well-delineated audience and is critic-proof.
Although shot on the cheap, long-time video director C.B. Harding gives Delta Farce the look of a much more expensive undertaking. The film is actually written by someone named Bear - Bear Aderhold (along with Tom Sullivan).
The performances are about what you’d expect.
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