Wet Hot American Summer

"You taste like a burger! I don't like you anymore."

Wet Hot American Summer was released in the summer of 2001 to little notice, almost as if no one got the joke. At the time, the headlining stars of the film were Janene Garafalo, David Hyde Pierce and Molly Shannon. However, the rest of the cast is a collection of future stars, including Bradley Cooper, Paul Rudd, Amy Poehler, Christopher Meloni, Elizabeth Banks, Ken Marino, and a very young Kyle Gallner.

The film takes place on the last day of camp in 1981 at the summer camp "Camp Firewood". The camp is populated with an array of oddballs including the Drama directors, played by Amy Poehler and Bradley Cooper, the camp director, played by Janene Garafalo, David Hyde Pierce as an Astrophysicist who lives next door to the camp, the horndog counselor played by Ken Marino, Michael Showalter as the sad sack, love lorn counselor Coop, the slacker counselor/lifeguard Andy played by Paul Rudd and Michael Ian Black as fellow camp counselor McKinley. Each actor plays their parts perfectly, creating great comic characters. I have to give special props to Christopher Meloni as the crazy camp cook who carries on conversations with a can of mixed vegetables (voiced by H Jon Benjamin, no less) and spouting off such crazy lines like he has to go to his cabin to fondle his sweaters, only to quickly cover it up and deny saying it.

The film is a parody of early eighties summer camp films, with rapid fire gags coming one after another, each more absurd than the last. No cliche is left untouched, from the climactic championship game (which turns out to be anti-climatic in this case), the training montage, and the various summer romances among many other things. To add to it, there is also a renegade piece of Skylab on a direct course to hit the camp, just to take the absurdity to another level. 

The film also has it's share of darker comedic moments, just so you know what type of comedy this is. Andy is a terrible lifeguard and finds himself having to cover up two sepereate drownings over the course of the day. There is also a montage of a group of counselors journey into town that quickly escalates from shoplifting to mugging little old ladies and shooting heroin. Of course, each of these scenarios is presented with the same level of nuttiness as the rest of the film.

Over the past thirteen years, Wet Hot American Summer has gone from an obscure little comedy to a bonafide cult classic. The array of future stars that are part of this film shows what a dynamite cast they really had. While the film may have been ahead of it's time when it was first released (most of the reviews were dismissive to negative). However, over time it continues to find a growing audience enjoying the hilarious silliness at Camp Firewood.