Van Wilder – Freshman Year: Unrated (Paramount DVD)
Picture:
C+ Sound: C+ Extras: D Feature: D
Why? Why did we need yet another Van Wilder release? The first one was vastly overrated and
unfunny, but any moderate hit in the DVD era is going to be stretched as thin
as possible, so we get the amazingly obvious and not-so-fresh Freshman Year and the fact that this is
Unrated makes no difference.
The title
character (now Johnathan Bennett) has somehow managed to finally graduate from
High School (bribes? everyone doing his
work for him?) and somehow gets into a college where he will continue to be a
bore and make us suffer through 100 dead minutes of wasted electricity. Smug, self-impressed, tired and dull, the
National Lampoon name is mysteriously missing from the cover and any frame on
screen, so even they bailed out. A
planned Blu-ray was also announced early, then abandoned. I can see why.
Every bad
joke you can imagine and have heard before is here again, so what’s
the point? Oh, we even get a party dog,
but even he is boring.
The
anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image looks like an all HD shoot with phony
color, but it looks good in detail more often than expected, but still
fake. The Dolby Digital 5.1 mix is weak,
dialogue (if you can call it that) based and dull like the film. To makeup for how bad this is, you get a
bunch of bad extras, including seven featurettes, bloopers and commentary with
the cast and Director Hary Glazer, who might get a Razzie if anyone remembers
this mess.
- Nicholas Sheffo
