July 27, 2001 | As many of you doubtless have guessed by now, when it comes to comedy, I’m a notoriously cheap laugh. Whenever Moe hits Larry with the frying pan, I cackle like a besotted hyena. If David Letterman is on a roll with his “Top 10” list, next-door neighbors may phone to complain about my guffawing. And when the killer rabbit attacks King Arthur’s men in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, well, you don’t want to watch, because it’s not a pretty sight: I am literally rolling in the aisle.
So if I tell you that I sat through agonizingly long stretches of Wet Hot American Summer without even cracking a smile, you should have a good idea of what to expect from this stunningly unfunny goof.
It’s obviously intended as a freewheeling parody of the slobby and slaphappy summer-fun farces — most specifically, Meatballs — that flourished in the late ’70s and early ’80s. But why? You can’t score many points, or earn many laughs, when you’re trying to spoof movies that no one, not even the people who made them, took very seriously to begin with. Indeed, all of those earlier (and much funnier) comedies – even G.O.R.P., a 1980 Meatballs clone that Dennis Quaid wisely has removed from his resume – were so exuberantly crass, so unabashedly silly, so blithely up-front about their vulgarity, they’re practically immune to satire.
Director David Wain and co-screenwriter Michael Showalter are veterans of MTV’s The Slate, a sketch-comedy series of the mid ’90s, so it’s not entirely surprising that their collaboration has the feel of something haphazardly patched together from archives of wildly uneven 10-minute skits. You want consistency of tone? You want a sense of narrative momentum? You want some semblance of continuity? Then check out another screen at the megaplex, where you might actually find, you know, a movie. American Summer plays more like a hit-and-miss, dumb-and-dumber series of variety-show blackouts.
And it doesn’t help much that, in terms of editing, camera placement and overall pacing, the movie goes way beyond the merely slapdash, and reaches rarely plumbed depths of technical primitivism. How primitive? Think Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903). Think D.W. Griffith… oh, never mind, Griffith never made anything this klutzy. (He did, however, get more laughs with The Birth of a Nation.)
American Summer is set in a Maine summer camp on the last day of the 1981 season, which allows the filmmakers to earn a few modest wink-wink, nudge-nudge chuckles with period clothing, hair-dos and attitudes. The cast includes Janeane Garofalo as a disorganized camp counselor who turns decadent during an afternoon spree, Christopher Meloni (slumming between seasons of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit) as a manic cook who converses with canned vegetables, David Hyde Pierce as a vacationing astrophysicist who suspects Skylab will crash-land on the campgrounds, and several other people who likely will follow Dennis Quaid’s example and delete this fiasco from their credits.
You have to ask yourself: What were they thinking when they signed on? When did they realize what they’d gotten themselves into? How did they rouse themselves out of bed and go to the set each morning?
More important: Where is Jason Voorhess, the hockey-masked killer of Camp Crystal Lake, when you really need him?
