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Movies
10.26.2001
No humor too low for lame camp spoof
BY TOM MAURSTAD
The Dallas Morning News
Movie credits and rating
As farce, satire, goofball anarchy or whatever its creators convinced themselves they were making, Wet Hot American Summer is as subtle and sophisticated as its title.
The setup for this "comedy" is as a spoof of summer-camp flicks; strange enough, since Meatballs and a litter of Friday the 13ths hardly seem enough to qualify as a genre worth spoofing. Stranger still is the way this movie mockingly disregards all the things typically expected in a film -- all those humdrum elements such as a plot.
Of course, expecting such things marks you as just the sort of tradition-bound dullard this movie aims to shock. Think of this as Freddy Gets Fingered at Camp. Like that Tom Green comedy, this movie is nothing more than calculated outrageousness.
In a recurring motif, young campers drown as their uncaring and oversexed counselors make out -- and as a visual punchline, any young witnesses to the drownings are tossed out of a moving van on a desolate stretch of road. And then two male counselors have sex in such a wildly gratuitous fashion it makes Queer as Folk seem like Masterpiece Theatre.
Like Freddy Gets Fingered, this is an almost laughless bomb. It's just unrelenting, unrepentant shock-schlock. And as an added bonus, there is a level of calculated hatefulness -- everything from the stereotype of the Vietnam vet as raving psychopath to Molly Shannon's adult counselor being romanced by and getting engaged to a pre-pubescent camper.
The responsible parties are David Wain and Michael Showalter, who were part of the MTV-spotlighted comedy troupe The State. They co-wrote and co-produced (the former directed; latter also appears as a camp counselor and as an aged standup comic).
Inexplicably, they lured in a name-brand cast, led by Janeane Garofalo as the camp director and David Hyde Pierce as her nerdy love interest. It's hard to know what they were thinking in accepting these roles, but whatever it was, they should endeavor never to think it again.
*
Wet Hot American Summer
Starring : Janeane Garofalo, David Hyde Pierce, Molly Shannon, Paul Rudd.
Producers: A USA Films release written by Michael Showalter and David Wain, directed by Wain.
Playing : Avon Cinema.
Rated : R, contains profanity, sexual situations, drugs.
Running time: 1 hour, 37 minutes.
No humor too low for lame camp spoof
BY TOM MAURSTAD
The Dallas Morning News
Movie credits and rating
As farce, satire, goofball anarchy or whatever its creators convinced themselves they were making, Wet Hot American Summer is as subtle and sophisticated as its title.
The setup for this "comedy" is as a spoof of summer-camp flicks; strange enough, since Meatballs and a litter of Friday the 13ths hardly seem enough to qualify as a genre worth spoofing. Stranger still is the way this movie mockingly disregards all the things typically expected in a film -- all those humdrum elements such as a plot.
Of course, expecting such things marks you as just the sort of tradition-bound dullard this movie aims to shock. Think of this as Freddy Gets Fingered at Camp. Like that Tom Green comedy, this movie is nothing more than calculated outrageousness.
In a recurring motif, young campers drown as their uncaring and oversexed counselors make out -- and as a visual punchline, any young witnesses to the drownings are tossed out of a moving van on a desolate stretch of road. And then two male counselors have sex in such a wildly gratuitous fashion it makes Queer as Folk seem like Masterpiece Theatre.
Like Freddy Gets Fingered, this is an almost laughless bomb. It's just unrelenting, unrepentant shock-schlock. And as an added bonus, there is a level of calculated hatefulness -- everything from the stereotype of the Vietnam vet as raving psychopath to Molly Shannon's adult counselor being romanced by and getting engaged to a pre-pubescent camper.
The responsible parties are David Wain and Michael Showalter, who were part of the MTV-spotlighted comedy troupe The State. They co-wrote and co-produced (the former directed; latter also appears as a camp counselor and as an aged standup comic).
Inexplicably, they lured in a name-brand cast, led by Janeane Garofalo as the camp director and David Hyde Pierce as her nerdy love interest. It's hard to know what they were thinking in accepting these roles, but whatever it was, they should endeavor never to think it again.
*
Wet Hot American Summer
Starring : Janeane Garofalo, David Hyde Pierce, Molly Shannon, Paul Rudd.
Producers: A USA Films release written by Michael Showalter and David Wain, directed by Wain.
Playing : Avon Cinema.
Rated : R, contains profanity, sexual situations, drugs.
Running time: 1 hour, 37 minutes.
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