Rotten Tomatoes score: 10%
This is a movie that no one on the planet earth other than me seems to remember. Even I had only the vaguest possible recollection until I found it available for streaming this morning and decided to refresh my memory.
Meet the Deedles is the most X-treme movie of all time. It's like a 90-minute Mountain Dew commercial. Phil (the late Paul Walker) and Stew (Steve van Wormer) Deedle are two totally righteous teenage superdudes from Hawaii who are so tubular that within the first five minutes they've been arrested by a jet-ski-riding truant officer while parasailing on a school day.
Their grim, wealthy father is so disappointed in them that he ships them off to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to work for a month in a juvenile work camp. But the camp turns out not to exist, and instead it's just a psychotic mountain man who drives at high speed through the woods, crashes his truck, and sends the Deedles comically flying into the air and through the campsite of two female National Park Service recruits named Mel and Mo.
The Deedles, unaccustomed as they are to the cool mountain weather, change into the nearest available sweatsuits, which belong to Mel and Mo and conveniently have their first names written inside the collars. Then they take off on a high-speed skateboard escape down the highway, where they accidentally free a bunch of circus animals to keep Mel and Mo busy while the Deedles are knocked unconscious and identified at the Yellowstone hospital (by the names written inside their sweatshirts) as Mel and Mo. So at this point we realize that this has all been an absurdly elaborate set-up for the Deedles to be mistaken by the authorities for the new junior rangers.
Fortunately, all the blustering ranger captain (John Ashton) knows about his new hires are their first names and that they are outdoor survival experts. So he forces them to eat bugs for dinner and assigns them to stop an ongoing invasion of prairie dogs that threatens to disrupt the festivities during the one-billionth-birthday celebration for Old Faithful.
This is the plot of the film.
It turns out the prairie dogs have been introduced into the park deliberately by Dennis Hopper, a former ranger who lost his badge and wants revenge. It also turns out that Stew Deedle is a computer hacker—how could he not be?—and I guess he hacks into the prairie dog colony or something. I'm starting to lose the thread.
Meanwhile, Phil Deedle has fallen in love with the irascible captain's second-in-command and step-daughter, Jessie. Also meanwhile, Mel and Mo, the real outdoor survival experts, are putting their skills to the test while avoiding the escaped circuis animals.
Again, this is the plot of the actual film. I did not make up or imagine any of this.
Dennis Hopper sends two bumbling idiots, one of whom is played by Freddie Krueger, to kill the Deedles, but they fail in cartoonish ways because they're stupid. Unfortunately, the real Mel and Mo eventually make their way to the park and spoil the Deedles' scam. Then, while the captain is berating them aboard a helicopter, the bad guys somehow cause him to fall into the river in an appallingly bad blue-screen shot.
The Deedles perform a surf-and-rescue mission, and Jessie, who turns out to be a professional stunt helicopter pilot, airlifts them to safety. Having won over the captain by their heroics, the Deedles get a second chance to win their ranger badges. I guess now they want to be actual rangers. They also throw a luau, which Stew describes as a "Don Hoedown" because the Yellowstone people apparently don't know what a luau is. I hadn't mentioned it before, but the dialogue in this movie consists almost entirely of winking, ironically stupid quips like that.
The hacker Deedle deploys his plan to drive the prairie dogs out of the park using mentholated arthritis cream, but Dennis Hopper sabotages it by causing Old Faithful to explode. Stew immediately suspects sabotage—a theory that Phil at first dismisses as "so diculous it's re-diculous"—but Stew proves it using a computerized map readout with blinking dots.
In Dennis Hopper's evil underground lair, the Deedles learn the true depth of his sinister plan: to divert the high-pressure water away from Old Faithful into a new geyser called New Faithful, which will be the highlight of his own, competing national park. Fortunately they are able to outwit his dimwitted henchmen and redirect the geyser to its original location just in time to save the birthday celebration.
Then it turns out that the geyser has been supercharged, creating a giant crater lake with surfable waves in the middle of Yellowstone, which the Deedles' grim, wealthy father names Deedlestone. I think this is basically the same thing that Dennis Hopper was planning to do, so in retrospect maybe his sinister plan wasn't so bad. But he has now been arrested for blowing up Old Faithful and trying to kill people, I guess, so let's forget about him.
Looking back, I'm not sure I've ever actually seen this movie before. I know I saw part of it on the Disney Channel or something, or maybe on VHS, but 90% of it did not ring any bells. It's much, much, much better than I remembered. I've done my best here, but I don't think I'm doing it justice.
