Superficially, WET HOT is about the last day of sleepaway at Camp Firewood in 1981, but the plot is merely an excuse for ninety minutes of gags, skits, and 80s spoofs. When you watch it, remove from your mind any notion of reality or logic, since most of the humor flies in the face of reason and possibility. Throughout the day, the time flashes on the screen, indicating roughly our progress through the story, but also how characters tend to appear frequently appear in two places at once and accomplish amazing tasks in miniscule amounts of time. As long as you accept the rules the movie operates within - that absurdity is funny, and being funny is more important that being plausible - you can really enjoy yourself.

Though Wain and Showalter brought along several key members of The State - notably Ken Marino as pseudo-stud Vic and Michael Ian Black as “girl-shy” McKinley - they also recruited outside their ranks for some inspired casting, like Christopher Meloni as Gene, the combat shocked Vietnam Vet who is the jittery cook at Camp Sunshine with a freakish tendency to blurt out his most perverse desires at the worst times. Paul Rudd plays Andy, the camp hunk, and eternally huffy angry teen. When he’s making out with a fellow counselor instead of lifeguarding the kids playing in the lake and one drowns, he drives away from the camp throws the only witness (also a child!) out of a moving van rather than just dive in and save the child. Absurd, but man, what a hilarious sight gag when that kid gets tossed out of the van.

The de facto star is Showalter as Coop, a sweet and lonely counselor who pines for Katie, who is unfortunately Andy’s girl and totally oblivious to his feelings for her (despite his desperate cries of “I want you inside me!” as she walks away from one of their brief conversations). As the day drags on, Coop and Katie do grow closer, culminating in a passionate love scene in the goat pen. It’s late in the afternoon, so both are chilly, Coop offers Katie his favorite flannel. When she remarks at how warm it is he notes “It’s my favorite flannel...so I’m gonna need it back.” “Now?” she replies. “Yeah...now...” and she has to return it and shiver.

Besides drawing on their vast store of knowledge about camp, WET HOT also has a ton of spot-on genre spoofs, like the graphic love scene in the picture taking place between two dudes in an athletics shed, and the camp baseball team of lovable misfits getting ready for their final game of the season only to decide they don’t want to play because their cinderella story of failure leading to impossible success is too trite. And, in my personal favorite, Gene tutors Coop on the ways of the world and women with a training montage, which, for no reason whatsoever, includes dance lessons, and a hilarious riff of the beach scenes from ROCKY III between Rocky and Apollo.

Some of the final act of WET HOT, at the camp talent show, doesn’t work, but by then there are so many outstanding moments of absurd comedy, that it doesn’t matter. Besides, if the movie had a satisfactory ending and a strong sense of plot or flow, it would have been easily marketable, and could have done well at the box office in the first place. And then what kind of cult film would it have been?