Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector

I played on a Baptist College baseball team over twenty years ago with Dan "Larry the Cable Guy" Whitney. Even back then he was only a part- time pitcher but a full time clown. I wish he had shifted his focus and concentrated more on his curve ball. If he had then perhaps we would have been spared his first feature length film---"Larry the Cable Guy Health Inspector".

As a "starter" project this movie echoes the transitions made by other comedians-- most notably Jim Carrey (Ace Ventura -Pet Detective) and less notably Rob Schneider (Deuce Bigelow-Male Gigolo). However Dan's talent is probably better compared to the late Jim Varney and his alter ego-- "Ernest P. Worrell". Still, I can much more appreciate Varney's eccentric talents than Dan's stubborn assault on our sensibilities by offering repeated renditions of a stock version of a crude redneck character(or has he broadened this into being somehow representative of "blue collar crude" in an effort to pull some of the population living north of the Ohio River into this movie's prospective demographic?)

In "Health Inspector" Dan manages to exhaust most of the material found in his stand up routine. He also comes up with some new bits- most of which are only incidental variations on his old bits. It's true that he does break some new ground also. We get to see Larry in love through an indirect appeal to pathos. But the sum total of this film, in the end, is that it serves as little more than a woeful compilation of "Larry's the Cable Guy's" rather sloppy rise into the national consciousness.

The touchstone for deciding whether or not you should give "Health Inspector" a chance can be found in Dan's signature stage utterance---"Git r Done". If the humor buried in that expression appeals to you ---then by all means check out the movie. But if the phrase leaves you lost, cold and empty---you had best give the film a pass. For my part, I have never been able to translate "Git r Done" into anything that quite registers as "funny" on my tired brain. But I still went and saw the show anyway. After all, like I said --I used to play ball with this guy in school.

Normally when a new bad movie comes out, it usually sky rockets up the bottom 100 list. This is mainly just a trendy thing. You Got Served, Bloodrayne and From Justin to Kelly were among these unlucky ones. Oh sure they were bad movies alright, terrible movies to be blunter. But when you looked at the movies like Red Zone Cuba, Gigli and of course Manos, you couldn't really rate them as that bad.

NOT THIS TIME

Think of the most horrible, hateful put down you could ever attach to anyone and anything and it still wouldn't do Larry The Cable Guy justice. That's right folks. 40 years on and finally, Manos is now the world number two on the chart. This movie is the biggest piece of s**t to ever stink up the theatre. It is so jaw droppingly, blood-boilingly bad that you wouldn't even serve it to your most hated emnemy.

Not only is Larry The Cable Guy the single worst most horrible movie of all time, but it is the spawn of the single worst most horrible idea of all time. The plot involves a series of food poisonings at the city's best restaurants, with the All City Top Chef contest just days away. It's up to Larry and Butlin to figure out who's sabotaging the competition, even if it means taking on the breast-obsessed mayor.

Got that folks? It's another toilet humor film which sucks! And it's another film directed by a first timer (Trent Cooper)! See Deuce Bigalow for reference! In the first five minutes of the redneck comedian's film debut, we see Larry urinating on himself in the shower, flashing his butt crack, having a flatulence attack in front of his boss, and referencing the smell of "strawberry douche." At this point I turn unto God and ask "Why?" Why does Hollywood keep doing this with impunity!

Trent Cooper is only there to keep the movie in focus (he even fails that at times) and to make certain there are enough fart jokes to keep the overlong running time rumbling. Seriously, you could make DVD chapters out of the number of times Larry -- or anybody, really -- makes with the southern thunder. That is how awful this movie is. It can't even save itself with fart jokes.

Larry The Cable Guy is truly the worst movie of all time. It should be driven to a quiet spot, forced to kneel down and be shot through the head. That'll learn it!

NEVER WATCH THIS MOVIE.

Plato contends that the soul is distinct from the body and is capable of maintaining a separate existence from it. Aristotle, in contrast, feels that body and soul are two aspects of the same underlying substance; form and matter.

The dualist position has reigned supreme. However, by espousing a distinct type of substance for the mind, dualists invite the question: What is it that makes it possible for two contraries to interact? I've always had a soft spot for dualism, but after seeing the first 5 minutes of Larry the Cable Guy's "Health Inspector" I've fully adopted an identity theorist's approach to the existence, or lack thereof, of the human soul.

It seems highly improbably, if not impossible, that an immortal mind could promote, as an artistic expression of itself, the sordid tale of this so-called "Health Inspector." It's nothing more than a farce: man as some sort of pure, critically thinking substance existing in a platonic heaven where a universal Cable Guy sits, perpetually gitting-r-done!

I walked into the theater hoping I would get some good laughs. I went with my friend who worships Larry's humor. I left the theater disappointed. This movie is filled with the same joke over and over again. Basically overdone toilet humor. I have nothing against the humor, it's just the same jokes repeated over and over again. Nothing new or inventive here. Larry's humor was not creative. Just diarrhea jokes over and over throughout the whole entire movie! And that was the whole running gimmick! It became rather boring. This is a simple film which had the potential to be funny but destroyed it with horrible acting and boring humor.

Unlike the very first reviewer, I confess that I never played college baseball with Larry the Cable Guy at Boston College or anywhere else. I did have a pretty tough week this week, and in celebration of the fact that I work some long and crazy hours I did my every other week Friday Matinée movie expecting some really crude, baseless, and thoroughly stupid humor.

I was not disappointed.

Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector is a reasonably competent movie vehicle for Dan "Larry the Cable Guy" Whitney, allowing for the fact that it is rife with all the flatulent, politically incorrect, crude, redneck, and every other kind of socially unredeeming humor we have come to know him for within his solo stand-up and "Blue Collar Comedy Tour" career.

The whole crux of this film revolves around Larry's job as a restaurant health department inspector who happens to be offending virtually every one in his path and screwing up at his job. To correct his ways or end his career, he is allied with a new partner, the virtually hermaphrodic Amy Butlin (played by suitably hermaphrodic nerd-turned-comedienne Iris Bahr). What ensues is a caper in which Larry finds a love interest, belittles his partner, laughs at his retarded neighbor, abuses a phony paraplegic, wrestles a uni-browed daughter of a crooked restaurateur, degrades all manner of human life, all while trying to solve the case of serial food poisoning. We are also treated to what Jerry Mathers looks like at the end of his career and to what became of Thomas F. Wilson (remember Biff Tannen?) as if he actually had a career as a quasi-straight (don't you think that's funny, I called Biff straight?) guy for Larry's gaffs.

Sound interesting? Of course not, but every crude one-liner in Larry's repertoire (new and old) is balanced against a sometimes funny sometimes lame plot. There is enough of "Cable Guy" humor and off-beat timing to laugh at, even some things the P.C. police would send you straight to Hell for. Ample fresh material exists to keep the not-so-funny lines from keeping the average Cable Guy fan from disliking this movie.

Anyone expecting any more or less of Health Inspector is probably not a Larry the Cable Guy fan, and certainly should not see this film. If you are, however, and you just want to see about 90 minutes of absolutely insolent yet funny bathroom-style garbage disguised as humor, then by all means "Git 'er DUN" and see this film. It could be worse, of course, but comeonn….it's Larry The Cable Guy, NOT Shakespeare.

4 out of 10 for a comedy like this means it is B-style humor worth seeing if you understand the brand of humor being presented. I did take a shower afterward though.