Ode to the joys of corndogs and red necks
18 May 2002
If you're the sort of person who thinks of the WWF as soap opera for rednecks, or who finds the esteem with which Nascar is held by a certain segment of the population to be mildly amusing, you might love this movie. Imagine Beavis and Butthead as young adults, except that their cultural horizons have been formed by monster truck pulls, hoedowns, the timeless art of Pit Bull breeding, pickup trucks, corndogs, chewing tobacco, and you have an incomplete, but somewhat descriptive, portrait of Roy and Gill, the two main characters of this film. They're such stupid but affable good old boys.

Gill and Roy pick up a hitchhiker in their `brand new' (it's several years old, but to Roy and Gill, it's `brand new') Toyota pickup. The truck overheats every 20 miles or so, which gives the three time to get acquainted. The hitchhiker is longhaired hippie type who's returning from his mother's wedding. Roy and Gill think he's `touched in the head' at first, because he doesn't talk much (Roy and Gill talk completely hilarious rubbish non-stop); but they bond with him when they learn that the hitchhiker is returning from a wedding where his mother married his uncle. Roy and Gill immediately connect with the man, warmly offering him a corndog; and, instead of referring to him as `Led Zeppelin,' address him by his first name. It's a touching moment.

The unsuspecting hitchhiker undergoes a personal transformation as he travels with Roy and Gill. It's so heartwarming to watch. Why, at the outset, he has about as much force of personality as a mouse fart. By the end, he can mess with a person's head along with the best of them. His neck is much redder than it was at the outset, which, in this context, it a very good thing. And he has a gun.

I like this movie so much, I plan to buy it. It bent me sideways several times from sheer uncontrollable laughter, forcing me to rewind for lines I had missed.
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