Never heard of this movie, good review though. - Marc
By AMY BIANCOLLI
For the Chronicle

There's a scene near the end of Without a Paddle, a successfully infantile new spin on Deliverance, that involves a pair of plump survivalist pot farmers and a half-naked nebbish.

As it happens, the half-naked nebbish is claustrophobic. To soothe him, his two similarly semiclad buddies break into a song by Culture Club. Soon he joins in.

``Do you really want to hurt me?" he asks, his hesitant tenor quavering with fear. ``Do you really want to make me cry?"

All by itself, this is a terrific sequence: Movies have always had their way with half-naked nebbishes, but surely the confluence of narrow cave, Boy George and trembling manlet breaks some new cinematic ground. If the scene went no further -- if the character just sang his way out of the mine shaft and into our hearts -- it would be a notable highlight in a notably funny film.

But then something glorious happens. The plump survivalist pot farmers begin to sing.

The visual and aural epiphany of this moment -- this fleeting vision of hairy men with firearms belting out omni-sexual '80s pop -- put me over the edge. Of the seat. With my head between my knees, as though I might actually pass out from laughter-induced hypoxia. Which, for the record, I didn't.

But the fact that I might have goes a long way toward recommending this brisk, crude romp, which doesn't look like much at the start but through sheer slapstick effort bushwhacks a path to hilarity. It's juvenile, it's vulgar and it's derivative -- but there's an unexpected spark to its juvenility, vulgarity and derivativeness.

This is really nothing more than three city slickers who get lost on a canoe trip. The nebbish among them is Seth Green (Austin Powers); the others are Matthew Lillard (Scooby-Doo) and Dax Shepard (Punk'd), whose résumés are full of intellectually marginal yahoos. The yahoo factor remains in Without a Paddle, but Lillard and Shepard are softened by the humanizing presence of Green, whose smart comic timing and aroused twitter of fussiness remind me -- OK, this is weird -- of the late Tony Randall.

There is an Odd Couple feel to parts of Without a Paddle, although that sitcom never had Felix and Oscar up a tree with a prehensile-toed woman named Flower. The movie wants so badly to explore the bonds of friendship that it trips up sometimes, trying to be deep.

Director Steven Brill works the boobs-in-wilderness angle with attention to both meanings (that's boobs, not wilderness).

Without a Paddle will neither change the world nor advance the evolution of film as art. On the other hand, it has attack animals high on ganja (prompting the line, ``Get up, you stoner dogs"). Sometimes, that's all you need -- that, and Boy George in a mine shaft.
HoustonChronicle.com - Vulgar, yes; crude, you bet; but, man, 'Paddle' is funny