Nobody's Baby is an odd film. At times, its humor will have you rolling on the floor, and at other times, its mean-spiritedness and sense of cluelessness will leave you frustrated. It's a film that seems to want to achieve several different objectives, and travel a few different paths, and inevitably ends up tripping over its own feet and falling face-first into the muck.

The story introduces us to two bone-headed criminals—the young and naive Billy Raedeen (Skeet Ulrich) and the disgusting Buford Dill (a hilariously unrecognizable Gary Oldman)—who have managed to bounce in and out of prison all their adult lives. Thanks to a silly prison break, they find themselves free and traveling separate paths. Buford goes straight for a bar, but Billy embarks on the weirdest adventure of his life, in which he will suddenly become the surrogate father to baby girl who has survived a horrific car accident. Billy's crash course in parenthood is helped along by a trailerpark full of misfits, including a kindly waitress (Radha Mitchell of Pitch Black), an emotional middle-aged train wreck (Mary Steenburgen), a showgirl (Anna Gunn), and an Indian whose only goal in life is to build a teepee out of bottlecaps. Billy and Buford find their way back to each other, and although Buford's first instinct is to make money off the tyke in the form of a ransom, Billy kinda likes the feel of fatherhood.

The movie is a chaos of weirdness, on one hand focusing on the more repulsive aspects of babyhood, on another hand getting its hillbilly jollies out of its redneck caricatures, and on another hand wallowing in terrible violence. All in the name of comedy. Some of this black humor works in an outrageous sense, but unfortunately most of the film just leaves you gawking at the screen in disbelief. The filmmakers were clearly going for the Raising Arizona crowd, but perhaps a more apt crowd would be those who found endless hilarity in Deliverance.

Artisan presents Nobody's Baby in a pan-and-scanned full-frame transfer of the film's original 1.85:1 aspect ratio. Although this film never made it to theaters, it still would have been nice to view it in the aspect ratio in which it was shot. However, to the transfer's credit, the director seems to have framed his compositions with an eventual TV presentation in mind. The panning and scanning isn't terribly noticeable, save for a few scenes.

Getting past my negative marks for the incorrect aspect ratio, the film actually looks impressive. Colors are vibrant, and detail reaches into backgrounds. I noticed several instances of haloing and aliasing, however.

The DVD offers only a Dolby Digital 2.0 track. It's nothing to write home about, but it gets the job done. Dialog is crisp and accurate. Music comes across well.

All you get is an anemic trailer.

The movie is forgettable, the disc commits the sin of panning and scanning, and you get no extras. This one might be worthy of a rental, but I'd avoid a purchase.