"Wet Hot American Summer" (2001)

Wet Hot American Summer is a weird, silly movie filled with a scatter-shot of every last goofy joke it come up with. It's a send up of every 80's movie cliche the film can think up, chewing up and spitting back them to see what comes back up. Some of these jokes don't land or go on for far too long but the smorgasbord style of joke telling allows for the film to move past the gags that fall flat and onto something funnier. In its mid stretch the film is moving so rapidly from one shenanigan to the next that it doesn't quite matter that the film is fairly inconsistent. By embracing the awfulness of the cliches of late-70's and early 80's movies (particularly summer camp movies but really everything and anything to the point of off-putting specificity to anyone outside the know) the film occasionally makes the same mistakes those movies do. The film is perhaps most interesting for its large number of then largely unknown actors and comedians that would blow up in a few years time, including a scene stealing Amy Poehler, Paul Rudd, Bradley Cooper, and Elizabeth Banks. This is a movie throwing everything it has at us to try to make us laugh, and thus it's fitfully funny -- though it too often fails, those moments where it is funny are pretty hysterical and inspired.

Grade: B-