It's the last day of Camp Firewood 1981 in Maine. Camp director Beth (Janeane Garofalo) is interested in physics professor Henry Newman (David Hyde Pierce) who lives nearby. Gene (Christopher Meloni) is the volatile Vietnam vet cook. Susie (Amy Poehler) and Ben (Bradley Cooper) intends to put on a show. Andy (Paul Rudd) is the bad boy making out with Katie (Marguerite Moreau). Gail von Kleinenstein (Molly Shannon) is the art teacher struggling with her divorce. Victor (Ken Marino) is a bumbling womanizer wannabe. McKinley (Michael Ian Black) is in a secret relationship with Ben. None of the camp counselors are terribly concerned about the kids' safety as craziness runs rampant.

This is a scattered parody filled with random crazy characters and ridiculous situations. I first saw this a couple of years ago. The cast is a who's who of today's hottest stars. They seem to be having crazy fun doing silly skits. It's definitely a hit and miss proposition. It misses more than it hits but it misses with a charming stupidity.

The setting is Camp Firewood, the year 1981. It is the last day before everyone goes back to the real world, but there is still a summer's worth of unfinished business to resolve.

What a great cast: Bradley Cooper, Amy Poehler, Molly Shannon, Elizabeth Banks, Paul Rudd and others. Some of them young and just on the verge of starting their careers (this was Cooper's first film). Others , like David Hyde Pierce, were stepping outside the box people had come to expect from them.

I do love that it is a mixture of "The State" (greatest sketch comedy show ever) and "Saturday Night Live". I love that it features my favorite Loverboy song ("Turn Me Loose") and I especially love all the pointless Wilhelm Screams.

No thorough review is necessary. This film already has enough fans. While I think it may be slightly overrated, and not as good as "They Came Together", the love is understandable. Especially for Chef Gene, who is really the glue holding this picture together.

You cannot intentionally make a cult film. You make a film, and due to a number of largely undefined reasons, it may or may not evolve into a cult film; - either instantly or after several/many years. That's a theory I always firmly believed in. Why am I mentioning this here? Well, because - to me at least - it often uncomfortably felt as if "Wet Hot American Summer" was made with the deliberate and quite fanatic intention to be a cult film straight from its release. As a result, the film comes across as pretentious, with a too obvious "this-comedy-is-better-than-rest" attitude, and arrogant, with a sort of "if-you-do-not-find-this-funny-you-are-wrong" undertone. But, again, this is just my perception. And I've been wrong before.

That being said, I didn't at all hate "Wet Hot American Summer". And it did become some kind of cult film, even if it were only for the fact that it splits the audiences into two extremely opposite camps. 50% of the people who watch this film absolutely love it, and claim it's the most brilliant and funniest comedy ever made, whereas the other 50% completely hate it and wonder out loud whether the writers weren't mentally disabled. Me, as so often the story of my life, find myself stuck right in the middle.

The storylines in "WHAS" are occasionally very original and clever, and occasionally very weak and derivative. The jokes and type of humor are sometimes hilarious, but sometimes also tremendous misfires. All the characters are stereotypes and the themes are clichéd, but on the other hand, the situations are practically always unconventional, dared and unseen. The biggest trump of this film is undoubtedly its spontaneity and randomness. Literally everything can happen in "WHAS", regardless of how random, illogical or far-fetched it may seem. For that alone, this oddity deserves at least seven stars and my strong recommendation to check it out.