Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Woody Woodpecker Goes to Camp’ on Netflix, A New Full Length Movie That Promises To Test Parents’ Patience

Not since Ernest P. Worrell mugged at the camera has a more anticipated summer-camp movie been released: Woody Woodpecker Goes to Camp is the FIRE-HOT sequel to 2017’s Woody Woodpecker, a DOA kid movie that apparently scraped up enough views on Netflix to inspire the streamer to grunt out a follow-up. Pray for Mary-Louise Parker, who leads the cast in a game of Let’s All Talk To The Blank Space Where A Wisecracking Toon Will Be Placed In Post; the film is directed by Jonathan A. Rosenbaum, whose credits include the Benchwarmers and Cop and a Half sequels you never knew existed. Add in a character who’s been splashing around in Bugs Bunny’s wake for 80 years, and you’ve got yourself a movie that’s… something else.

WOODY WOODPECKER GOES TO CAMP: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Woody Woodpecker (voice of Eric Bauza) is just trying to enjoy his pizza when his relative peace is disrupted by a YouTuber – perhaps the only creature more irritating than Woody Woodpecker – out “camping” in his designer yurt with all his friends, his fancy sneaker collection and his boba tea machine. So Woody thoroughly and methodically humiliates the guy, and gets kicked out of the forest for his efforts. What an upsetting turn: This is a world where rapid-chattering influencers can disrupt a harmless woodland animal’s attempt to mind his own business and spew an ode to his cheese-and-sauce pie, and the animal is punished for retaliating. JUSTICE IS A LIE. It’s a world I would never want to live in. Burn it down!

Now, just when you think the plot is going to follow the path of 21st-century cliches and make Woody a viral trending internet star for his antics – remember, you can’t humiliate an obnoxious YouTuber because they get paid for humiliating themselves – it takes a turn towards 20th-century kid’s-camp-movie cliches. Tasked by a forest ranger to learn a little something about not being a loud, selfish, egomaniacal individualist, Woody finds himself at Camp Woo Hoo, run by Angie (Parker), a very nice lady who bases all camp activities on STEM subjects. And that means all her campers are exclusively nerds, dweebs and dorkwads who couldn’t climb a tree or kick a ball if their life depended on it. Woody befriends Angie’s daughter Maggie (Chloe De Los Santos), who introduces him to the goth girl and the math kid and the computer gal, you know, all the stereotypes of every kid movie released between 1976 and 1997.

Woody believes, as any sane person would, that earning a teamwork medal at Woo Hoo will allow him re-entry to his beloved forest home. Of course, being an Agent of Chaos, he makes everything at the camp exciting in a bad way, e.g., destroying things milliseconds before the inspector, Wally Walrus (voice of Tom Kenny), arrives to ding Angie for all sorts of violations. (Like I said, THERE IS NO JUSTICE HERE.) Meanwhile, the neighboring camp, Camp Hoo Rah, well stocked with camo-clad militarized bullies and led by a meathead named Zane (Josh Lawson), gears up for the annual Wilderness Games, where they will trounce Camp Woo Hoo in tugs-of-war, canoe races, capture the flag competitions and other forms of punishment being sold to children as “fun times.” And if that’s not enough plot for you, evil cretin Buzz the Buzzard (voice of Kevin Michael Richardson) turns up to seek out a lost treasure buried somewhere on the grounds. What reigns around here? Chaos, my friends. Chaos reigns.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Woody Woodpecker Goes to Camp makes 2021’s Tom and Jerry look like Scenes from a Marriage.

Performance Worth Watching: The Mary-Louise Parker of Fried Green Tomatoes and Bullets Over Broadway is gone. Now all we have is the Mary-Louise Parker of Woody Woodpecker Goes to Camp. We will persevere through this harsh reality. We have no other choice.

Memorable Dialogue: Woody meets Maggie as she struggles with a camp activity: “A whittler, eh? I’m more of a pecker myself.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: There’s something punk rock about Woody Woodpecker – maybe it’s his mohawkish red feathers, maybe it’s his deep-seated disrespect for authority, maybe it’s his disdain for social media influencers, maybe it’s his frequent use of the double-entendre “pecker” in a G-rated movie. You have to admire someone so committed to being a bona-fide Agent of Chaos. But this kind of guy is fun for about 15 minutes before he starts to drag the cheese grater over your nerves, and you start considering ending the whole party just to get him to bail. 

This is a long way of saying that you, as an adult, are not likely to make it through Woody Woodpecker Goes to Camp. If you’re like me, you remember the old Woody shorts from when you were a kid, and they were fine in a pinch, when Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry weren’t on TV. They were short bursts of colorful lunacy, the key word here being “short.” Our current reflection on their brevity sounds positively sumptuous in light of this 100-minute resilience test of a movie, which features the following: Raw-sewage gags, an ancient jocks-vs.-nerds dynamic, Mary-Louise Parker getting blasted with mustard and the requisite life lessons about teamwork. There are scenes in which Woody hops into the frame for a one-liner then hops back out, and it looks as if he was dropped in after the fact, because god forbid this movie go more than 45 seconds without the lamest wordplay this side of Bazooka Joe gum wrappers.

Now, let’s nitpick Woody Woodpecker Goes to Camp for its inconsistent storytelling, because woodpeckers gotta peck, and critics gotta crit. The screenplay is structured like it took chunks of pages from other movies and stapled them together. It tosses in that hidden-treasure plot like it’s a rock in yer bowl of Froot Loops. Woody finds himself in a classic plot in which he creates all the problems for the other characters and then almost helps solve them. It also looks like crap, with cheap CGI and choppy editing. I’ve always had a soft spot for Woody Woodpecker, but this chintzy movie made me like him less. It has no charm, no wit, no laughs, no hope. 

Our Call: Pecker? I hardly knew her! SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.