Under the Radar DVD of the Week: 'Spork'
This week, the oddest DVD to appear on release lists is:
“Spork”
“Spork” only metaphorically refers those funny little spoon-and-fork combinations that they sell in camping supply stores. In writer-director J.B. Ghuman Jr.’s cheeky teen comedy, due out on DVD Tuesday, it’s also the name of the film’s nerdy little outcast who somehow manages to get the best of her school’s cool kids.
Ghuman’s low-budget feature debut, which premiered at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, reveals a promising young director who wears his influences on his sleeve. There are strong, potty-mouthed echoes of John Waters here, plus an obvious affinity for the musical uplift of “Glee” and the droll nerdiness of “Napoleon Dynamite.”
Spork (Savannah Stehlin) is a bespectacled, wild-haired junior high student who happens to be a hermaphrodite and is thus an awkward outcast and object of ridicule at her school. The gang of mean girls who torment Spork are lead by a snotty blonde cheerleader with the decidedly unsubtle name Becky Byotch (Rachel G. Fox).
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