HE CHARGES $10....BUT HE'S WILLING TO NEGOTIATE

I saw this Rob Schneider laugh fest twice theatrically and just pissed my pants both times; this was a simply must-have for a hole in my personal comedy DVD collection thats sorely lacking. I've had the disc for a good year now, but here's an official review of this soon-becoming-kind-of-classic comedy from the producers of Big Daddy, which is soon to be sequeled with Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo.

For those of you who never saw this comedy, Schneider plays "Deuce Bigalow," a down on his luck guy who just cant seem to hook up with a chick as he balances his "career" of cleaning fish tanks and Koi pools for rich folks; one of those clients happens to be a male escort/prostitute who asks Schneider to watch his "poon palace" for a few weeks as he goes to Switzerland because one of his rather expensive salt water fish is sick and needs attention. He allows Deuce to stay in his male-whore-paid-for apartment on the beach, and after running into "TJ The Pimp" (Eddie Griffith) once accidentally setting fire to Antoine the male escort's kitchen and wrecking his giant fish tank, he takes a job as "a man whore" to pay for the damage done to Antoine's apartment before he gets back. TJ becomes Deuce's pimp, but as Deuce soon finds out, TJ's clients are not what you would call "normal chicks"......his first "client" is a massively obese what-appears-to-be-a-man-in-drag who nearly gives Schneider a heart attack just by looking at him/her; Schneider's facial gestures in this role is what made the picture so funny --- you have to admire his reactions to what is going on around him, as what made him so good on Saturday Night Live.

From there, the "dates" Deuce goes on as a man whore just get worse.....he takes out a Terrets Syndrome terror who screams out vulgarities from the passenger seat of Antonie's Porsche which Deuce has taken out himself (Antoine warned him not to use the car), but Deuece has the solution to that, taking this chick to a ball game where she can scream out all the obscenities she wants. Another "date" has Deuce taking out a narcaleptic woman named Carol who falls asleep while bowling and eating soup on their date.....inbetween, Deuce meets "Tina," a gigantic Norwegian woman who towers over Schneider as they walk down the street and people yell out "Freak!" and "Keep it in the circus!" and "Thats a huge *****!" Its pretty funny.

All the while, a pretty hilarious William Forsythe plays a cop who is trying to bust Antoine for male prostitution, but his only way to get to him is to get to Deuce and threaten him to get him Antonie's "black book" of clients. Forsythe keeps popping up throughout the film, startling Schneider when he least expects it, to threaten him about busting Antoine and always pulling his shlong out of his pants to show Schneider and ask his opinions about rashes he seems to keep getting on it. This keeps happening throught the film and becomes pretty whacky after awhile but adds to the comedy. As Schneider's character contemplates continuing "man whoring" for TJ The PImp (which he gets inspiration for doing from his father, a mens room attendant at a local restaurant who admits to Schneider that his mother was indeed a hooker in Bangcock before he was born), he gets another job from Griffith for a date --- meeting this possible disaster at a sushi restaurant, he is happily surprised when the girl turns out to be a cute, "normal" college graduate who doesnt know Deuce is there for money....she thinks her friends are setting her up on a blind date, but he's really there on a male prostitution job. You can tell what happens here......Schneider's character falls in love with this girl, for just about the first time in his life, but you know, there HAD to be a catch about this chick otherwise Deuce wouldnt have been "hired" to please her as a man whore.......Im not gonna give it away for anyone who actually never saw this.....

So the plan is to get Antoine's apartment back in shape before he returns (because he threatened to kill Deuce if anything happened to his fish or apartment), due to the fact that Schneider destroyed his $6,000 fish tank and the water pretty much wrecked everything in his poon palace......and so Deuce goes full time into male prostitution as the only way to make the money needed to fix Antoine's place up and get a new tank put it --- along with an $800 fish (the one that was sick, but was accidentally chewed up in a blender by Deuce's girlfriend's blind roomate --- dont ask). Towards the end of the film, Schneider gets a call from a woman who was one of Antoine's clients because he is desperate to make the $6,000 mark needed to pay for the new fish tank, and this woman turns out to be drop-dead-gorgeous.....but also turns out to be Forsythe's (the cop thats trying to bust Antoine) wife.....seems Forsythe was not making her feel special enough so she needed to turn to Antoine to please her.....and Forsythe finds out and simply wants to bust Antoine out of revenge for banging his wife. Its a pretty funny twist, and the last dialogue exchange between Schneider and Forsythe when they are in an outdoor seafood restaurant on the beach is pretty hilarious as Forsythe is desperate to make Schneider understand that it's his "thin, pencil-like dick" thats just not satisfying his wife.....the whole scene is hysterical.

Does Deuce make all the money back in time to fix up Antoine the Male Gigolo's poon palace before he returns from Switzerland? What is the secret this girl Deuce falls in love with is hiding about herself? And what about Antoine's switched-out "sick fish" that now looks a little smaller in the tank --- will Antoine notice when he gets back that there's a new fish in there as well as a new TANK itself? Pop Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo in your players, those of you who never saw it, and find out!

VIDEO SPECIFICATIONS:
WIDESCREEN 1:85:1 TRANSFER ENHANCED FOR 16X9 TELEVISIONS

Touchstone/Disney/Buena Vista has delivered an average audio and video presentation of this Rob Schneider comedy; the video transfer looks clean, absolutely no doubt about it, and the 1:85:1 image filled my Mitsubishi 55" screen from top to bottom with no letterboxing.....but, if you look close, the transfer wasnt PERFECT.....perhaps Im much more judgemental than most for audio and video deliveries, as is my job, on these DVDs, but I was able to detect a not-so-clean print at times; I dont know if I would call it grain per se, but there was video noise surrounding certain scenes --- but CERTAINLY nothing distracting and a far-from-bad transfer. Colors were bright as was important in this film which relied heavily on beachfront atmosphere and mood.

AUDIO SPECIFICATIONS:
DOLBY DIGITAL 5.1

Nothing special going on here; in fact, to call this a "discrete 5.1" mix is really stretching it, as I was able to detect nothing from the rears at all, really......but, this is typical for a comedy release, and nothing that surprised me. And, as usual for most comedy audio tracks on DVD, the volume of this mix just needed more power......you're gonna find yourself needing to bring this one up a bit more than usual on your processor. But, the constant music on the track sounded clean and lively from the front soundstage once enough receiver power was applied --- songs that repeated through the film such as Blondie's "Call Me" came in loud and clear once the volume was up high enough. As I said, though, all of this comes through the front soundstage, that being your left and right mains and center, of course, with nothing, that I was able to detect, coming from the surround channels, even when there WERE missed opportunities such as a car screaming from one side of the screen to the other, which could have been rendered nicely through the surrounds but just didnt.....

....but a typical issue, as I said, on comedy soundtracks......

For a budget priced and produced disc from Buena Vista, they actually provided two pretty nifty special features regarding Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo, which included:

-Production Featurette
-Storyboard to Scene Comparisons