Saturday, April 17, 2010

Meet The Deedles

Remember back in the '90s when there were a bunch of comedies about two dopey guys? Bio-Dome, Wayne's World, Encino Man, probably some other Pauly Shore movies, that sort of thing? This is one of those.
In this case, the two dopey guys are Phil and Stew Deedle, whose father is very ashamed of them for being so dopey. So he sends them off to Camp Broken Spirits, but that doesn't exist anymore. So they sort of accidentally steal the identities of two nature freak ladies to become rangers at Yellowstone National Park, where they have to stop an infestation of prarie dogs.
The prarie dogs are part of Dennis Hopper's plot to get revenge on Old Faithful. (pause) I'm not kidding.
There's the obligatory "dopey guy romances smart hot girl" subplot, the bad guy's two obligatory dopey sidekicks and a Big Lipped Alligator Subplot about escaped circus animals.
Meet The Deedles is a stupid movie. I didn't dislike it, but it was stupid. If I had been younger when it came out, I probably would have gone to see it in theaters, loved it, and would own a copy for non-Robert Englund reasons. (As it stands, he's not in it enough to make it worth keeping on its own merits.)
Basically, it's obvious this movie wanted what all the Two Dopey Guys movies wanted: it wanted to be the 1990s Bill And Ted. The problem is, they didn't bother to really look at what made the Bill And Ted movies good. They just saw that the central characters were a couple of dopey guys and figured that must be the correct formula. So on that level, it fails.
On another level, the "well, that was stupid but at least I didn't have to think for the past two hours" level, it was just fine. I kinda liked it. It wasn't great but it had some lines that made me laugh and that's good enough for me. I was expecting Meet The Deedles to be awful but it was more formulaic than anything else, and I'm okay with that.
And I would love to see a Nostalgia Critic review of it.

End of line.
-Sally

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