Fathom Studios/Twentieth Century Fox's Delgo achieved ignominy when it earned $511 thousand in its first weekend, the lowest gross of any wide release in North American film history.
With an opening that bad, it didn't last long in theatres: it ended its run with $694 thousand, a fraction of the $40 million it cost to make the movie. Its box office take was doubly humiliating, considering it was the final film for both the late Anne Bancroft (The Graduate) and John Vernon (Animal House).
Now Fox Home Video is hoping Delgo will make some noise on DVD. Does this film's charms improve on repeat screenings, or should it still be avoided?
Fathom Studios' Delgo Stars the Voices of Freddie Prinze Jr., Jennifer Love Hewitt, Malcolm McDowell
The first thing one notices when screening Delgo again is the roughness of the animation. Despite the imaginative and intriguing designs, the characters move stiffly and have the plastic, glossy look of cheap CGI. It's especially apparent when they fall over (for some characters, it happens all too often): they bounce as if they were plastic dolls. They also move about far too much in sequence: an annoying trait with the comic relief, distracting with the more dramatic characters, like Louis Gossett Jr.'s King Zahn.
None of that would matter if the story was intriguing: unfortunately, this is another area where Delgo falls flat. The characters are cookie-cutter (the heroic teen, the beautiful princess, the evil seductress, the traitorous general) and there's only so much the voice actors can do to to elevate their roles.
In the case of Freddie Prinze Jr., Jennifer Love Hewitt and Bancroft, it's not much. However good they are in other roles, the fact remains that neither Prinze nor Hewitt are compelling voice actors: they can't compensate for not being able to use their faces or bodies during their performance. Bancroft actually died during voice recording; Melissa Suzanne McBride (The Mist) seamlessly imitated Bancroft's vocal tones for certain sequences.
As previously mentioned in the movie review, many characters move too much: the worst offender being the unfunny "comic relief" character Filo (voiced by Chris Kattan). It's as if the animators hoped that, by making the body language more overblown, they could somehow make the character funny.
DVD Extras
In the audio commentary, the filmmakers talk about how they originally wanted to make a film about race relations and living with one another. Considering that both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien both counseled that writers should "concentrate on telling a good story and leave the morals to fend for themselves," it might explain why this film tanked in theatres. The commentators sound bored, which doesn't help.
There are a number of deleted scenes (nothing worth mentioning), a behind-the-scenes featurette where the voice actors pretend to be excited about this flick, an extremely generalized discussion of the music and sound FX, an introduction to the characters and the various monsters in the film.
Finally, there's a short called "Chroma-Chameleon" which features a hapless reptile attempting to impress his fellow chameleons in a dance-off. It has too much set-up for not enough pay-off.
The Final Analysis
If there's a single word to describe Delgo, it would be "mediocre." It's not spectacularly bad, like fellow box office bomb Battle for Terra, or even offensively bad. Delgo is simply undistinguished, and deserves to sink into the swamp of film history, leaving not a trace behind.
It gets a 3/10.
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