Dukes of Hazzard - The Beginning

March 10, 2007

Rated: NR Runtime: 95 min Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Apparently the recent Dukes of Hazzard movie made enough money that it sparked a sequel.. er.. a prequel. But even that’s not quite right as this prequel is for the television series and makes ZERO sense if you’re trying to relate it to the movie. It’s also a straight to tv/dvd release, which considering the smell that’s coming from my stack of DVD’s was the right move.

Dukes of Hazzard - The Beginning Bo and Luke are cousins living in different counties, but they both tend to get themselves into a heap of trouble with the authorities. Bo likes to drive fast, but he’s not very good at it yet. Luke’s pleasure is blowing things up.. any problems can be solved with the right combination of explosives by his line of thinking. When the law has had enough and is about to throw them both in juvie, Uncle Jesse convinces the judges that they’d be better off working their tails off on the Duke farm over in Hazzard county instead. Obviously, the judges agree.

Jesse makes his living making and running moonshine, the farm is just there for appearances I suppose, and when things take a turn for the worse the boys volunteer to run the shine for their Uncle so that he can have enough time to make more of the blindness inducing potion for them to sell. There’s this whole “we’re gonna lose the farm” storyline that I’m just skipping here, you don’t care.. trust me.

I didn’t expect any high-brow humor from the movie, I just expected a little bit of mindless entertainment mixed in with some boobs and fast cars. All of that was present, but the overall package was so incredibly stupid that it was painful to sit though. Where to start the complaints..

The production values, the attention to details, the little things that make a movie work.. none of that was present with this movie. For example, many times in the movie when the subjects (Bo and Luke, Daisy, Uncle Jesse, etc.) were more than 10 ft from the camera you can tell that their voices are being dubbed into the movie. This happens in all movies when the actors dialog wasn’t clear enough, but in this one they weren’t even moving their lips! Yep, apparently one of the ways to switch this one between “tv friendly” and “unrated” was to make sure the characters were voice dubbed when cursing or saying things a bit off color. It comes off like a badly dubbed kung-fu movie.

Another thing… Cooter is gay, or at the least he’s bi-curious. When he’s first introduced he actually says something like “I’ll try anything once, except man on man actions. Nah, I’d try that too” as he’s looking fondly at Luke. This is just WRONG and was quite annoying every time Cooter was in a scene.

Uncle Jesse wasn’t gay, but he’s certainly a dirty old man. When a couple of hot girls walk by the boys after he’d just told them not to drink moonshine, he points the girls out to them and says “.. but there’s a couple of hot girls looking for a romp in the hay, you’ve got my permission to give it to them. In fact, Duke them one time for me!” Oh please, that’s just pathetic.

And lastly, Daisy never shows us her boobs. April Scott is smokin smokin SMOKIN hot and to tease us with that body and not give a payoff, it’s a crime. There are plenty of other naked girls to look at though, so the sting isn’t as bad as it could have been. In fact, the shear number of boobs and the presence of the General Lee are the only reason I’m giving this movie 2 stars instead of 1.

Posted by John | Filed Under 2 Stars, April Scott, Christopher McDonald, Comedy, DVD, Jonathan Bennett, NR, Randy Wayne, Willie Nelson