How does one distill the essence of this titanic work, the Nashville of absurdist comedies, into a simple retrospective? And how can a new recruit to its small but mighty cult ever manage to fully articulate the passions diehard fans feel for this film? Thus, it’s with a certain amount of trepidation that I sit down to write this. And yet until a year ago, my greatest cinematic embarrassment was that I had never seen Wet Hot American Summer. I myself am somehow a gay man who has thus far avoided Cruel Intentions. There are diehard film fans in this world who have still never experienced Citizen Kane.
Netflix has somehow come up with two series, a prequel (same actors 20 years later, still playing teenagers) and a sequel (set 10 years later, so 1991). I'll give it a D just for the crazy pacing. I spend the entire 90 minutes yelling at the screen: "Wait.that's impossible. But actors are so old that they are not at all believable teenagers, and the time-compression and time-dilation are bizarre.
They're next to the stick team's snacks."Īside from the uvula-licking scenes, the heroin/mugging scene, and some queasy anti-Semitic bits, the movie is not particularly disgusting. I didn't say dick cream, I said stick team.
Gail (Molly Shannon) spends the entire day in the arts and crafts cabin, crying over her ex-husband and being counseled by her campers.Įxcept for a brief scene of uvula-licking, Gary (AD Miles, left) spends the entire day in the kitchen, where head chef Gene (Christopher Meloni) says things that sound sexual, then backtracks: "The juice packets are in the store room, next to my dick cream. I don't know who Ben is.įor other characters, time seems to stand still. That's the end of the McKinley plotline,but we see him doing other things, like forcing a kid who hasn't bathed in two months to take a shower, and sitting in the audience at the talent show. Or are they homophobes? They show up at dinner with a wedding gift, a chaise lounge in a gigantic crate. Why is he hanging out with homophobes, anyway? Beth's over-the-top teary-eyed gushing sounds insincere, like she is making fun of McKinley and Ben. I'm not sure if it's a homophobic scene or not. Wait - how did they.and isn't Beth in town, shooting up heroin? Next the buds see them getting married, with Beth officiating. (A brief kiss and a shot of their legs while they're having anal sex). We find out when he sneaks off to the supply shed to have sex with Ben (25-year old Bradley Cooper). McKinley (30-year old Michael Ian Black) doesn't like kissing girls or watching girls skinny-dip. Henry teaches several science lessons to the campers, and he and Beth become a committed couple. While there, they smoke pot, buy cocaine, shoot up heroin, and mug a woman. So she and some other counselors drive into town to research astrophysics to impress him. Later he lets one of the campers fall off water skiis and drown.Ĭamp director Beth (Janine Garofalo) falls for Henry (David Hyde Pierce), an associate professor of astrophysics who is coming up for tenure (associate professors have tenure! Anybody hear of fact checking?). They go out to various activities that could not possibly fit into a single day.Īndy is so busy kissing a girl that he lets one of the campers drown. Never in my life have I seen such gross kissing). Andy (Paul Rudd, top photo) is licking his girlfriend's uvula (I'm not kidding. Then singularly ugly, 30-something teenage counselors all get together for their last morning briefing. It's the morning of the last day of camp at Camp Firewood, Maine, in the summer of 1981, and all of the boy campers are squirming around in bed with the girl campers.
Stephen Hunter: "This is supposed to be funny? It was so depressing I started to cry."īut recently I heard that it had a gay couple in it, plus it starred several gay and gay-friendly actors, so I plugged it in on Netflix. Stacie Hougland said "it's not only unfunny, it's downright repulsive." Roger Ebert wrote a parody poem instead of a review. I assumed from the trailers that it was all about girls in bikinis.īesides, it was a bomb - it made $295,000 on a budget of $5,000,000. I didn't see the 2001 movie Wet Hot American Summer.