What’s a guy to do when he catches an early flight home and discovers his girlfriend in a bed with a roomful of naked strangers? Why, return to college and sow his own wild oats by starting a fraternity, of course! That’s the premise behind 2003’s Old School, which helped both launch Saturday Night Live’s Will Ferrell into big screen stardom and set Vince Vaughn’s career back on its proper course.

Luke Wilson) throws a wild party at the new home he’s rented, only to discover that it belongs to the nearby college campus, and the outraged Dean Gordon Pritchard (Jeremy Piven) is none too pleased. Mitch’s friend Beanie Campbell (Vaughn) then figures out that the only way he can stay put is to put the home to use for some kind of college purposes, and he organizes the creation of a fraternity on Mitch’s behalf, open to anybody who wants to join.

What ensues is the sort of old-fashioned, frat house comedy that came about after Animal House first made its mark on the national collective psyche, with unapologetically formulaic antics piled on top of nudity and willful coarseness. As Mitch and Beanie’s friend, reformed party guy Frank “the Tank” Ricard, Ferrell gets naked and streaks through the streets, much to the surprise of onlookers and the embarrassment of his wife. Meanwhile, Mark (Craig Kilborn), a smarmy figure who’s less then enthused about Mitch’s advance toward his girlfriend Nicole (Ellen Pompeo), emerges as an antagonist of the guys, alongside Dean Pritchard.

Co-scripted by Scot Armstrong and director Todd Phillips, Old School isn’t an exercise in originality, that’s for sure. The characterizations in the movie are pretty cardboard-thin (women as empowered sex-pots, bimbos, shrews or some combination thereof), though it could be argued — certainly with Dean Pritchard, though rather wanly elsewhere — that this is part of the subversive point. Still, what Old School lacks in structured laughs it certainly makes up for in sheer manic fervor and eagerness to please. This is a young guys’ movie, through and through, and in the right mood and proper company, it’s a measured blast of enjoyable silliness.

The new HD-DVD release of the film, packaged in standard fashion and billed as “unrated and out of control,” imports a lot of the special features from the movie’s 2003 unrated DVD mainstream release, but the good news is that one can now watch Blue’s wrestling scene in crystal clear, 1080p resolution. Audio, meanwhile, comes in English, Spanish and French 5.1 Dolby digital plus tracks, which quite nicely showcase the movie’s raucous party scenes; subtitles are also available in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese.

A feature-length audio commentary track from Ferrell, Wilson, Vaughn and Phillips finds the guys cutting up just about as much as one would expect. Eight deleted scenes run 13 minutes in total, offering up a look Mitch paying Dean Pritchard a visit, an alternate version of his early arrival home, an inspection of the residence, and a look at Frank’s new inflatable companion. A five-minute blooper reel gives viewers a nice look at set crack-ups (including some amusingly flubbed work from Piven), while a 13-minute making-of featurette includes interviews with cast and crew. The best featurette, though, has to be a spoof of Bravo’s Inside the Actors’ Studio, in which Ferrell, as unctuous host James Lipton, interviews the three leads of the movie, himself included. A trio of TV spots and the film’s original theatrical trailer rounds out the disc. B (Movie) B+ (Disc)