Wet Hot American Summer – Review

Counselors party like maniacs around a campfire. Booze is drunk. Doobs are puffed. Dances are… uhh, danced. Tunes are strummed on the guitar. Life is grand. It is 1981 and the last day of the season for Camp Firewood, a magical place.

The youngsters are up early the next morning causing havoc while the hungover counselors try to get some extra sleep. It’s the big talent show that night too, and everyone knows you need someone to kiss after the event. Uh oh, pressure is on!

Gerald Cooperberg, or Coop (Showalter), has a major crush on Katie (Moreau), but Katie likes her unruly boyfriend Andy (Rudd), and Andy is just too cool for school, or camp. The director Beth (Garofalo) leads the counselor team of Ben (Cooper), Susie (Poehler), Lindsay (Banks), Victor (Marino), Neil (Truglio), McKinley (Black), Gail (Shannon), Abby (Ryan), Gary (Miles), J.J. (Orth) and more. She’s also caught Henry’s (Pierce) eye, a neighborly professor. Then there is also the cook, Gene (Meloni). Holy shit.

Wet Hot American Summer has a comedic style that not everyone will immediately jive with, but it’s worth understanding its ridiculous and satirical flow. It is so overacted and purposefully hammy while double stuffed with awkward lines and clever jokes designed to surprise with a crazy payoff. While it purposefully follows a clichéd story, the humor keeps everything so offbeat that it is relatively hard to anticipate.

Sometimes it is so dumb that it is quite competent, other times it is silly on purpose, but the whole time is a feel-good comedy with a level of bonkers madness attached tying it all together. The cast is absolutely stacked with amazing people, and most everyone gets ample time to shine despite a short film length.

I liked this film when I first saw it, but the more I see it the more ridiculous it becomes and the more fun there is to be had. Being used to its atmosphere makes it even better, so give it a watch or two to let it sink in. It remains very funny to this day, and the humor should work for more people than it doesn’t. Critics did not like this spoof much at all, but it’s quite solid.

“Cut it out Bobby, you’re fine.”

There are two TV mini-series follow-ups to this movie. The first is Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp from 2015. In this series, the original cast plays younger versions of their selves in a prequel series leading up to the movie. Absolutely no one hides the fact that they are 15 years older, making this a pretty silly prequel. It runs for 8 episodes.

The second TV mini-series is 2017’s Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later. This series is another 8 episodes which follows up on the end of the film’s promise by the counselors to meet up in a decade, at 9:30. It’s not as good as the movie or the prequel series, but has some jokes and goes pretty wild into insanity.