Wet Hot American Summer (2001)

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Camp counselors engage in all kinds of shenanigans on the last day of summer camp in August, 1981. Wet Hot American Summer is a throwback to raunchy, sexy comedies of the early ’80s, elevated by a charismatic ensemble cast who all appear to be having a great time. There’s Janeane Garofalo as the camp director, a nerdy gal trying to work her wiles on a reclusive professor who lives next door to the camp. He’s played by David Hyde Pierce (Frazier). Paul Rudd is cool as the bad boy who lets a kid drown while he’s inhaling Elizabeth Banks’ face. Amy Poehler and Bradley Cooper play the producing/directing team behind the climactic talent show. Michael Ian Black plays Cooper’s gay lover. Molly Shannon plays a recent divorcee whose arts and crafts class spend the entire day comforting her broken heart. And if anyone steals the show, it’s Christopher Meloni as the head cook, a Vietnam vet suffering from delusions and taking advice from a talking can of mixed vegetables.

In case you couldn’t already tell, Wet Hot American Summer courts the absurd, but doesn’t embrace it quite to the extent of a Zucker Brothers (Airplane!) comedy. There are a few site gags. My favorite is the recurring shot of a disobedient child being thrown out of a van on an abandoned rural road. But the film works best when it leans on its cast for verbal back-and-forth or seemingly improvised insanity. I find the Zucker Brothers approach exhausting after a little while, so I have to give kudos to creators David Wain and Michael Showalter for walking a tightrope. They provide just enough structure in their script to maintain forward momentum, and never let it impede the characters’ behaviors. And whenever a scene begins to feel banal, that’s when Wet Hot American Summer tends to take a drastic left turn. It usually works. And even when the broad strokes are shaky, Wet Hot American Summer gets through to the next round on strength of personality.