Lame. Lame. Lame. I once actually felt sorry for the filmmakers, before seeing the movie, who couldn’t understand why more people didn’t see the film. A good, funny, family film about Boy Scouts, they said. I now have anything but pity for this film.

Down and Derby commits the unpardonable crime of eliminating all humanity from all of its characters. None of these characters are human beings and the more central the character, the less human. The main non-human is Phil Davis (Greg Germann), father of a young Scouter, who along with his friends Claude (Robert Costanzo) and Big Jimmy (Perry Anzilotti), has a life long rivalry with Ace Montana (Marc Raymond). When the pine-wood derby comes along, it provides an opportunity for these fathers to compete with each other. It’s a good story concept, this idea that the father’s are more into the building of the little racecars than their sons. And it’s funny – for about five minutes.

But the fathers quickly descend into madness. Phil, our hero, begins to sacrifice his job and then his marriage on behalf of the wood racecar. Of course, he gets both back by the end, but the idiot should have lost them both. There is, as you might expect, a minor change of heart on Phil’s part at the end, but it is barely sincere and hardly makes up for his previous psychosis.

This is all not to mention that none of this is even funny. There’s slapstick and absurdity as the fathers compete with each other that might amuse young cub scouts at best. The actors don’t act like real people either. Lauren Holly, having descended into a third-rate children’s film, does herself no favors with an embarrassing performance.

There’s another odd element to the film I’m still not quite sure what to make of. All four of the men live next door to each other in quasi-mansions, each with models as wives and each with a single pre-teen son. Is there some sort of subtle satire going on here? Perhaps, but if so, the film doesn’t act like it. It ends up coming off quite the opposite. It’s all just another dimension of the film’s utterly surreal world. The whole film is fake plastic fruit.

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