The Movie: The Freshman is a mobster parody movie starring Matthew Broderick as a freshman film student at NYU who within minutes of arriving in New York has already had all of his earthly possessions stolen, and nowhere to turn to. That is until by chance, he finds himself doing work for a mob boss played by Marlon Brando who bears a curiously strong resemblance to "Vito Corleone" from The Godfather. Indeed, they make numerous references to this "resemblance" to the actor who played Vito Corleone (who, of course, was Marlon Brando), and in the world of this film, Brando's character in "The Freshmen" was actually the inspiration for The Godfather.

This is a thoroughly entertaining movie, with some great physical comedy and plenty of obvious and not so obvious references to other movies. The physical comedy combined with the mindblowingly unreal situations Broderick finds himself in lead results in a lot of laughs, though The Godfather and The Godfather Part II are definitely required prerequisites before seeing this film.

Fans of the Godfather trilogy might notice that the character "Vic" was played by the same guy who played the young version of "Clemenza", and the guy who played "Carlo Rizzi" also makes an appearance in the film.

If you love mobster movies, I think you'll love this film's over the top situations, and what else could top Brando parodying Brando playing Vito Corleone?

The DVD: This is a fairly bare-bones DVD release. The disc itself is double sided with a widescreen version on one side, and an unmatted 4:3 version on the other. Though the transfer was fairly clean and didn't show many signs of compression artifacts, it did seem that the black point was set a bit too high, resulting in an overal lack of contrast, and the colors seemed somewhat faded.

Sound could be described as adequate and unremarkable at best, and the only special feature to be found is a theatrical trailer (in unmatted 4:3 format). Basically, nothing here but a very basic presentation of the film.