Without a Paddle: Nature's Calling DVD: Review By Brian Gallagher

Sadly, this seems to be a trend that doesn't appear to end: the "sequoff." See, I coined this term, many moons ago, during some review of a similar sort of flick, because you can hardly call Without a Paddle: When Nature Calls a sequel. A sequel actually continues the, you know, story, and doesn't just rip off the general premise and slap a sequel title over it. Since they insist on branding it as a sequel, but it's really just a rip-off perpetrated by the studio that has the rights to the original (which makes it even worse), it's a blend of a sequel and a rip-off... hence, "sequoff." Without a Paddle: When Nature Calls is certainly a "sequoff," and while there are tiny shards of entertainment to be found here (some from rather athletic, unlikely places), it's something that shouldn't really have existed in the first place.

While the first film didn't exactly scrounge up a decent box office take ($58 million domestic), I actually rather enjoyed the oddball comedy and while I have to imagine this was made on a fraction of the original's $19 million budget, just because you can make something cheaply, doesn't necessarily mean you have to make it at all. The only thing this has in common with the first flick is the Oregon wilderness, the bonds of male friendship and chicks living in a tree. Seriously. That's it. Instead of three lifelong friends searching for D.B. Cooper's famed lost fortune, this flick is about two lifelong friends, Ben (Oliver James) and Zach (Kristoph Turner), two guys who have lost touch over the years and go on a journey to track down the girl that Ben has obsessed with ever since she moved away shortly after their first meeting. Ben is a workaholic lawyer who's lost touch with his old friend over the years, and Zach is a free-wheeling senior home nurse who, as a favor to a dying patient, agrees to help find her granddaughter, who's been missing for seven years, before she passes. When he discovers that granddaughter is Heather (Madison Riley), Ben's aforementioned crush, Ben agrees to go along on this journey and they get some unexpected company in the form of Nigel (Rik Young), Heather's annoying British step-brother. Supposed high jinks and hilarity ensue... or are supposed to ensue, but they don't in the hands of this rather inept cast and crew.

With a few exceptions, the acting is pretty damn terrible here. While Oliver James and Kristoph Turner do have some solid chemistry together as these friends Ben and Zach, their fed some simply terrible lines throughout the film from screenwriter Stephen Mazur and the deliver them in even worse fashion. While we get some nice eye candy in the form of the lovely Madison Riley, as Heather and Amber McDonald as her fellow "eco-warrior" Thunderstorm, (I might be "spoiling" some stuff here, but really... I'm not), their acting, while not as prominent as the main two guys, is still rather painful to watch and it seems that Riley was cast as a look-alike/scale-pay version of Heather Graham... who can't act nearly as well. The only two performances I liked were actually the only two things I liked about the movie as a whole. Rik Young is rather entertaining as this eccentric British relative of Heather, Nigel, delivering practically all of the few amounts of laughs throughout the film. The other performance is that of former NFL legend Jerry Rice, who plays the interesting role of Hal Gore towards the end of the film. For a guy that has only acted in one other feature film - Necessary Roughness... where he had no lines and played a prison football player - he did pretty damn good and got a few laughs himself. While his inexperience does show here and there in his nice little five-minute part, he definitely does command presence on the screen and I thought he did quite well for his first speaking part in a feature film.

OK, back to the bad stuff, which is everything else. The film is written by Stephen Mazur, who you'll be surprised to learn wrote Liar, Liar... well, co-wrote Liar, Liar, which leads me to believe that either some people should write with partners, or not at all. This script is filled with the lowest of low-brow entertainment, but what's even worse is we don't even get the naughty language or debauchery that normally comes with this sort of bad material and usually results in way more laughs than I got out of this. The dialogue is just uninspired with an attempt at a quirky catch-phrase ("Holy sh*take"), the plot is fairly predictable and you're just so damn bored by the whole thing you don't even really care what happens to these characters at all.

A fair share of the blame has to be heaped on the shoulders of director Elliot Elkayem, a horror director whose only theatrical engagement was that of the disastrous Eight Legged Freaks. He's never directed a straight-up comedy before, and it certainly shows. Not only that, but it seems this guy just loves awful CGI animals, with the use of several CGI squirrels, which are just mind-bogglingly bad. He has terrible command over his actors and it's no wonder this guy hasn't had a film go beyond straight-to-video since Eight Legged Freaks.

Lets see, to sum up, this is pretty damn bad, folks. While we get spots of entertainment from Rik Young and Jerry Rice (oh, with a nice little nod to his Dancing With the Stars appearances as well), they don't offer nearly enough to make this 90-minute snoozefest worth checking out... unless you have a free rental or something... maybe.

We actually get a decent amount of stuff for a straight-to-video flick like this. Up the Creek: Making of Without a Paddle: Nature's Calling is first and it's a 10-minute garden-variety featurette featuring all the main players - all the actors, the writer, director and producers - just giving some general glad-handing statements about the flick. What I didn't get was the screenwriter Stephen Mazur saying they were looking for a connection from the two films and they used the "two girls that lived in a tree," something I barely recall from the first, which is an odd connection to a film. Maybe, and here's just a wild guess... you could use, as a connection, a continuation of the STORY. I know, crazy talk, right... I really didn't think this thing needed to be so damn long, but I never really like watching featurettes like this if it's for a movie I didn't like, so yeah. If you did in fact like this movie, you will probably like this too, I guess.

Furious Nuts is next and it's pretty dang retarded. It's this spoof piece about the squirrels on the set. They say first that they had a real actor in a squirrel suit, and then they go to say they cast real wild squirrels and then talk about Hollywood pro squirrels. It's kind of cool, I guess, because they seemed to get EVERYONE in the cast and crew on board for this little seven-minute piece and, of course, it's supposed to be ironic since they used these terrible CGI squirrels in the flick. I guess it's kind of funny, that they can make fun of themselves like that, especially given how terrible the squirrels really looked on the flick.

Treehouse Tales is next and it's a little featurette about the treehouse that Earthchild and Thunderstorm live in. It's only three minutes long and it's not that interesting... and the production designer has a very annoying voice.

Deleted Scenes are next and we get four of the most worthless deleted fractions of scenes you'll ever see. I don't think all four of those scenes even lasted two minutes... COMBINED. Horrible.

The Gag Reel is the last thing we get on here and, honestly, you'll probably get just as many laughs in this five and a half minute reel than you'll get in the whole flick. It's pretty funny and most of it is with NFL legend Jerry Rice constantly (and colorfully) mixing up his lines. Well, at least they end this disc out the right way...

The film is presented in the widescreen format, enhanced for widescreen 16x9 televisions.

The sound is handled through the Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound format.

Pretty dang lame. We get the three main dudes on the front sinking in a raft with a keg floating alongside them with an odd squirrel on top of the keg. Blah. The back cover features a few random pics from the flick, a synopsis, small special features listing along with the billing block and tech specs. Lame.

Without a Paddle: Nature's Calling, while it does have its (very few) moments, is just another sad attempt to make a franchise out of an original film using the bare minimum needed to make a film.