I read on the internet somewhere that Wet Hot American Summer is a cult phenomenon in New York City. I haven’t noticed any evidence of this in my 17 years living here. My wife and I streamed this on Netflix because we are Paul Rudd fans. We were a bit nonplussed, to be honest.

Wet Hot American Summer is not a spoof on summer camps. It’s a spoof on Jewish summer camps, and I must say, a pretty geeky and heavy-handed one at that. Until my wife pointed this out I was sitting there wondering why sizable parts of the movie were going right over my head, like the overly long Janeane Garofalo scene where she makes up all the Jewish names, or the scene where they boo the Godspell number despite clearly having loved it, just because a lighted cross appeared at the end of it, or the seemingly endless scene with the old Jewish Catskill stand-up guy breaking the audience into stitches despite his painfully repetitious attempts at humor, to name just three of many. These scenes may or may not be funny to Jewish people (I wouldn’t know) but I think it’s safe to say that they are not particularly funny to most non-Jewish people.

Still, I can kind of believe that this film is a cult classic in some circles, because there is considerable cross-over into less specific brands of comedy, and it contains an incredible number of actors that later went on to bigger and better things. But the humor is basically good for at most a lot of grins and a few chuckles. I liked the crazy cook who humped refrigerators and talked to a tin can – he was pretty funny. Also, Paul Rudd’s delivery as the sex-crazed idiot stud is so good that even though his character is not that well written he still comes across as funny. Ditto for Amy Poehler; you can tell from this movie that she and Rudd were destined for greatness, despite their limited roles. Garofalo and David Hyde Pierce (an actor that mercifully disappeared after the 90’s) were not very funny at all, nor was Molly Shannon. And I found the central character, played by Michael Showalter (who also wrote the movie,) to be rather uninteresting and vaguely irritating and unsympathetic.

As far as the “famous” score goes, they did manage to dredge up some great old 80’s songs, a few of which I literally had not heard since the 80’s. (It’s amazing how great bands like Loverboy sound when compared to today’s crap.) But its use of all this good  music was a little lame; they basically only used it to poke fun at the songs themselves and at the 80’s in general. As I mentioned elsewhere on this blog, this use of music only works if you use bad 80’s songs. These songs were a little too good for this purpose, and the discord hurt the movie.

Really, this film is a great big mess. They have Paul Rudd letting kids die, they have quite dull sequences where Molly Shannon falls in love with a 9 year old and where the geeky kids save the camp from getting smashed by a piece of Skylab, they have the dull love story involving the main character, they have a secondary love story between Garofalo and Hyde Pierce that seems cute at first but then goes nowhere, they have all this gay humor that feels very dated, and they have comic sequences that are so bizarre and lame you can’t even imagine how or why they were conceived. It’s all over the place, and they make no attempt to pull any of it together.

As far as comic farce goes, I’ve seen way better. And as for its status as a cult film, my impression is that despite its few legitimate charms, it’s a pretty desperate choice. Still, it’s probably worth streaming on Netflix, if you like this kind of thing, or you are a Paul Rudd fanatic.