DELICIOUS

Carl Hiaasen, meet Hannibal Lecter.

Caterers to a movie shoot are covered by the Teamsters Union’s lucrative contract conditions, and Las Vegas production caterer Big Jack Lucey doesn’t see why island caterer Sid Tanumafili and his family should have a monopoly on everything shot in Hawaii. But Sid, his son Wilson and his nephew Joseph like the current arrangement just fine. So when a unit producer brings Jack with him to cater the pilot for a hoped-for TV series, Sid declares war on the invaders. The mainlanders are hobbled by a couple of handicaps that won’t surprise fans of Moist (2002): Francis, the producer, is mourning his breakup with Chad, a big-shot producer with the morals of a gay lifeguard, and Big Jack has recently suffered a stroke that’s left him partly paralyzed and with a bad case of technologically induced priapism. While Jack is getting the local Teamster leaders to sign on the dotted line, Yuki Sugimoto, Francis’s New Age production assistant, is reinventing herself as an androgynous sexpot on the advice of Lono, the local pimp she falls for. Unable to concentrate for long on anything but his sempiternal erection, Jack hires an ex-Marine hit man to settle his labor problems, but unexpected complications with the payoff force him to an even more sanguinary Plan B. As the entire cast caroms from one lighthearted set piece to the next with all the speed and depth of pinballs, an unidentified pair of them is unwittingly headed for a future in the Tanumafili barbecue pit, and the rest headed nowhere in particular. The effect is fast, funny and sometimes winsome, but consistently lightweight, the characters’ bizarre actions fueled by nothing more than their unquenchable appetite for sex, liquor, drugs or the next plot twist.

Rated NC-17 for intermittent comic violence, good-natured swearing, cannibalism, humorous amorality and some truly perverse sex.