Review: Woodshop DVD

STUDIO: 42 Productions | DIRECTOR: Peter Coggan | CAST: Jesse Ventura, Don S. Davis, Mitch Pileggi, Scott Cooper Ryan, Jonathan Davis, Olivia Hendrick
RELEASE DATE: 9/7/10 | PRICE: DVD $14.99
BONUSES: none
SPECS: NR | 89 min. | Comedy | 2.35:1 widescreen | stereo | English subtitles

RATINGS (out of 5): Movie | Audio | Video | Overall

Teen comedy Woodshop is an independent movie with a bare-bones budget and a writer/director keenly in touch with the mind of a pubescent boy. It features that other governator, Minnesota’s Jesse “The Body” Ventura (Predator), as the hard-headed, ex-Army Ranger shop teacher assigned to keep a class full of immature losers from cutting off their hands in a circular saw.

There’s a small sprinkling of other talents in Woodshop, and some of the actors are pretty cringe-worthy, especially during frequent childhood flashbacks, but a competently written script, a lighthearted vibe and a charismatic, likable performance by former Governor Ventura make up for this deficiency.

Unlike many teen comedies that try to make high school into what it surely seems like to those living it (that is to say, glitzy, dramatic and far more important and serious than it really is), Woodshop clicks by showing teen-hood as us adults recall it: a purgatory of incompetence to navigate and revel in, filled to the brim with weirdoes, jerks and scrappy morons.

Shoestring film that Woodshop might be, there’s no excuse for the poor audio quality. It seems as though the movie was recorded on a cheap camera-mounted microphone, and the irritating resonance does not appear to have been fixed for the DVD release.

 

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About Alex

Alex Kikuchi loves movies of every size and variety and has fancied himself a film critic ever since Mystery Science Theater made it look so easy when he was a kid in the 1990s.