Delivery (DVD)

Monty Goth (Matt Nelson) is a loser, plain and simple. He's a pizza delivery man in a long line of pizza delivery men, and the son of a murderer to boot. So, if he follows in daddy's footsteps in one aspect, he's bound to follow in all others, right? Right. No surprises here.

Monty's life is pretty bleak. All he does is deliver food to discourteous customers, take abuse from his belligerent boss, and sit around his dark apartment brooding, eating, and looking at the wall upon which an askew framed photo of his father hangs. His car gets towed away, a drag queen harasses him, and his guidance counselor makes him feel hopeless. Even when he is sleeping, life doesn't improve: Monty dreams of his tragic childhood, over and over again.

Before long Monty snaps and goes on a killing spree, brutally murdering everyone who ever slighted him, then makes pizza pies only Jeffrey Dahmer could love.

Delivery is a low budget film, so I take the lack of resources into account when I write this review of yet another direct-to-disc flick about a strange loner who winds up killing everybody in his orbit.

The movie's actors are clearly pretty inexperienced, but everyone has to get their start someplace. A spare few are better than others, such as Tara Cardinal in the thankless role of the only person who is ever nice to Monty (for no apparent reason, I might add). Nelson is also decent; he somehow makes Monty not totally intolerable in spite of a thin-crust personality that goes from seething to slashing with nothing in between.

I didn't take much exception to any of the performances in particular, but I did find the writing and directing to be an outright insult to the watcher's intelligence. Everything is so obvious, overstated and unrealistic — which can actually be OK, as long as the overt nature of the material is handled in a surreal, humorous, or grand guignol manner. Or at least with some evident talent. That's not the case here. It's just ineptitude with putrid pepperoni on top. Basically, Delivery doesn't deliver.

DVD extras include a commentary, plus a behind the scenes featurette which is basically a slide show of snapshots somebody took.

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