The year is 1981, it's August, and the last day of the holidays at Camp Firewood. The kids get up and start running around aimlessly while the head councellor Beth (Janeane Garofalo) mildly tells them to behave while she sips from her coffee mug. As it's the final day, the announcer over the tannoy tells everyone that if they haven't had their summer romance yet, then they'd better hurry up, as time is running out. And no-one knows this better than Coop (Michael Showalter) who is in love with Katie (Marguerite Moreau) but only able to admire her from afar, as she is the girlfriend of fellow councellor Andy (Paul Rudd), who she isn't aware has a roving eye when it comes to the opposite sex. Nevertheless, Katie has a short conversation with Coop, the longest time he has ever spoken to her, and he now has hope it may lead to something better. He's not the only one with romance on his mind, as Beth meets a local professor, Henry (David Hyde Pierce)...
Few would claim the nineteen-eighties summer camp genre as the very pinnacle of cinematic achievement, and as they were supposedly comedies in the first place, albeit largely lame ones, you wouldn't have thought there would be much to parody, at least not successfully. However, Wet Hot American Summer was here to prove you wrong, devised by scriptwriters Showalter and director David Wain, with the help of some of the cast of their cult TV sketch show The State - Wain, Showalter and cast member Michael Ian Black would go on to create the cancelled but equally cult Stella. Here they invented a surefire way of wringing laughs from the genre, although at first it seems like business as usual.
There's all the stuff you'd expect to see in the first half hour, with the actors playing the teenage councelors plainly overage (I'd like to think this was a casting decision nod to the glory days of summer camp films), only it's slightly hysterically pitched: when Beth suggests to Henry that he could hold a science class for the "indoor" kids, he barks a furious "NO!", for instance. He changes his mind, however, and the camp splits up into groups for music, swimming and sports, among other things, but it begins to look a little too much like kooky comic mundanity. Then something becomes apparent: all the people in the film are actually insane.
