For those of us who went to college in the late sixties and early
seventies, it is truly heartbreaking to see what has happened to The
National Lampoon brand. In the magazine's early days, it was edgy, funny,
original, and very often downright brilliant - imagine a smarter, totally
uncensored version of the kind of material Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert
do today. The writers included such comic geniuses as Doug Kenney and
Michael O'Donoghue. When the company branched out into films, it mined the
talents of some other terrific, if more mainstream, writers like Chris
Miller and John Hughes, and made some flicks which are now beloved
classics: Vacation and Animal House. There was a time when comedy junkies
like me would buy anything with The National Lampoon name on it, knowing
that at its very worst it would be better than just about any other source
of humor, and at its best would be at the very zenith of American humor in
the 20th century.
The years have not been kind to the franchise. In the last 20 years
they're made exactly one comedy worth seeing (Van Wilder), and one that
isn't too bad (Vegas Vacation). Every one since 2002 is cow flop. In fact, the brand has
been so mismanaged that the name now means the opposite of what it once
meant. People like me automatically stay away from anything prefixed by
"The National Lampoon presents," knowing that at its best it will not be
worthwhile and at its worst it will be heavy-handed, juvenile, trite,
obvious, and generally unfunny. More depressing to me than any of those
adjectives is the fact that their material is now just plain dumb. The
brand which was once unafraid to publish
Jean-Paul
Sauvage, Philosopher Detective, has now become a receptacle
for elementary school playground humor. Worst of all, they don't just
develop their own weak projects, but they also slap their once-revered
brand name on films after-the-fact, thus bestowing their blessing on weak
projects developed by others. Why? Presumably they get a few bucks for the
use of their name.
This is one of the worst, possibly THE worst in a long line of bad,
sophomoric films released with the Lampoon imprimatur. It's such an
amateurish effort at comedy that it would embarrass those two guys who
made Epic Movie and Date Movie. Even Carlos Mencia wouldn't steal these
jokes.
It is a film about making a film. The film-within-a-film, which
occupies much of the running time, is a compilation of tasteless
old-fashioned jokes delivered as non sequiturs, without a storyline. The
jokes are the ones you and your friends exchanged at recess in the seventh
grade. It is, more or less, a hard-R version of Rowan and Martin's
Laugh-In. Pretty hip material, eh? This is the kind of project that could
have played on drive-ins in the 70s, starring some washed-up vaudevillians
like Keefe Braselle or Pinky Lee, with cameos by Henry Gibson and JoAnne
Worley. The real National Lampoon guys of that time would have ridiculed
it mercilessly if they chanced upon it, which they probably would not
have, because they would have been busy trying to think up some obscure
jokes about Tycho Brahe, or wondering what Tarzan might have been like if
he had been raised by flamingos instead of apes.
The parent film, which is to say the shell around the
film-within-a-film, basically consists of a bunch of guys arguing about
whether to say the "n-word" in their film when they make tasteless jokes
about black people, and debating about whether anybody would see such a
film.
Jeez, I hope not.
And you shouldn't see this one either.
