Home Video: Wet Hot American Summer

Wet Hot American Summer
Directed by David Wain
Released July 27, 2001

If nothing else, "Wet Hot American Summer" is funny. It starts off as a great send-up of the idea of summer camp, with perfectly representative characters and hilarious storylines. The cast is great, with some surprises like Christopher Meloni, currently starring on "Law & Order: SVU," as a deranged dining hall worker, and David Hyde Pierce ("Frasier") as a nerdy astrophysicist. For anyone who ever went to summer camp, this is a fun mockery, and for those who didn't, it provides an accurate enough picture before taking certain large liberties in exaggerating the behavior and activities of the camp counselors. It has an amusing beginning, and carries on in a similar fashion for maybe an hour or so, before it goes off the deep end and becomes far too crazy and inane to legitimize itself as a story. While its complexity is nowhere near the likes of "Team America: World Police" or "Borat," it definitely has a promising start which unfortunately fails to deliver throughout the film.

C-