By David Wain, 2001.
Starring Michael Ian Black, Janeane Garofalo, Gideon Jacobs, Joe Lo Truglio, Ken Marino, Christopher Meloni, A.D. Miles, Marguerite Moreau, Liam Norton, Zak Orth, David Hyde Pierce, Amy Poehler, Paul Rudd, Molly Shannon, Michael Showalter.
Rating: 9/10, 4/10.
Wet Hot American Summer is one of those movies that are utterly impossible to talk about without just listing funny parts. It’s like one of the Zucker-Abrams-Zucker movies in that it doesn’t even try to be a coherent movie, but rather just moves from one funny bit to another in a vaguely plot-related way. This makes sense when you consider that the director, writer, and huge portions of the cast come from MTV’s distressingly short-lived The State, perhaps the funniest show that’s ever been on television. It was a sketch comedy show, and it’s easy to see that minds used to the sketch form created this movie; they seem uncomfortable with the full length of the movie, and while Zucker-Abrams-Zucker films seem somehow to benefit from their incoherence, this one tends to suffer from it.
However, just about every single individual part of the movie is so fantastically, wonderfully funny that I don’t feel like talking about anything that wasn’t good. OK, so technically Wet Hot American Summer isn’t the best movie ever made, but regardless, it’s frickin’ hilarious. Essentially, I recommend it to anyone who saw and liked The State; as for anyone else, I’d say track down some old episodes of the show first, and if you like it, watch the movie, too.
As I said, all that’s left to talk about are which parts I thought were funniest. I don’t want to just make a long list of things, since none of it would be particularly funny to someone reading the review rather than watching the movie, and I don’t want to give away too much of the comedy, anyway. But I’ll just say that the scene when some of the camp counselors go away from camp and into town one afternoon is awesome. The line where a girl reacts to learning that a piece of Skylab will crash into the camp in an hour and a half by saying "But that’s only as long as one mixtape!" is pure genius. David Hyde Pierce’s urgent "Meet me by the picnic table in ten seconds!" is one of the funnier throwaway moments I can remember, from any movie I’ve ever seen. And that’s really all I can say. Just go watch the movie.