Once hated by critics, ‘Wet Hot American Summer’ returns to Netflix

TORONTO – Like all the best summer-camp reminiscences, stories about the notoriously hedonistic shoot on the first “Wet Hot American Summer” can sometimes feel embellished.

With a sprawling cast sequestered for 28 days on the rickety grounds of a real Pennsylvania summer camp, the cast — which included Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks and Bradley Cooper — cut loose with such abandon that tales of drunken nights and random hookups have become part of the cult comedy’s lore. Amy Poehler recently joked that she partied so hard she forgets the shoot entirely.

Looking back, star and co-writer Michael Showalter says the legends are, in fact, accurate.

“We were all young and crazy and single,” he said in a telephone interview. “We were holed up at this camp for six weeks and most of us never made a movie before.

“We were partying pretty hard. That’s very true. At the end of the every day, there was nothing else to do really but that. And it’s what we wanted to do anyway.

“It wasn’t like Led Zeppelin partying. It was pretty garden-variety stuff.”

At the time, Showalter “somewhat naively” dreamt that the film could stack up to the ensemble comedies that inspired him, “Caddyshack” and “Animal House.”

That didn’t happen — the film was ignored by mainstream moviegoers and savaged by critics — but the eccentric comedy gradually accumulated an audience, and its following’s loyalty has been rewarded with Netflix’s new prequel “Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp.”

Miraculously, Showalter and director/co-writer David Wain actually got the whole band back together — even Cooper, who figures into all eight episodes despite being available for production only briefly. Producers even managed to wrangle new cast members Kristen Wiig, Chris Pine, Jason Schwartzman and Weird Al Yankovic.

Despite its prequel status, “First Day of Camp” does nothing to disguise the advanced age of its supposedly teenage counsellors.

Wain initially expected that to be a central joke of the new series, but instead found he quickly stopped noticing: “It’s like watching Shakespeare — once you get used to it, you forget about it.”

Set on the last day of camp in summer 1981, the original film was a manic mix of surreal satire, lunatic sight gags, knotty meta-humour and nostalgic melodrama.

If that doesn’t sound like a surefire formula for a box office bonanza, well, the movie grossed a paltry $295,206 over its run. And critics hated it.

Washington Post’s Stephen Hunter wrote: “It was so depressing I almost started to cry.” USA Today suggested a more appropriate title would be a “cold shower on a dreary winter day.” Rogert Ebert set his scathing review to song, a tribute to Allan Sherman that declared the film “cinematic torture.”

Wain and Showalter were in their early 30s, with their lone shared career highlight standing as the similarly divisive MTV sketch series “The State,” which had ended years before.

Still, they didn’t give up on their movie. They set up screenings at colleges, museums and smaller theatres. Incrementally, they stitched together the cult audience that would herald the show’s return.

“We’d been through something very similar on ‘The State,'” Showalter recalled. “We’d already done something that critics didn’t like, but then audiences did like, and then the critics changed their mind.

“We knew: ‘Here we go again. The critics aren’t going to like it, a certain portion of the fanbase will, and then people will come around.’

“But why can’t that just happen when it comes out?”

Certainly, this Netflix follow-up will be more enthusiastically received when it launches Friday — a cause for validation, perhaps, or even celebration.

Of course, one of the few things that changed in revisiting “Wet Hot American Summer” was its once-wild set had turned rather dry.

“We’re all middle-aged, and we all have kids and families,” Showalter conceded. “It was very different. We would come to set and at the end of the day go home to our families.

“It still had a lot of the playfulness though, and the atmosphere of fun and camaraderie. It was different in that aspect, but in a lot of ways it was very similar.”

Follow @CP_Patch on Twitter.

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