Movie Reviews

n 1978, Ivan Reitman produced a film of epic proportions, one that connected with a generation yearning for liberation on a deep, spiritual level. The film, of course, was National Lampoon’s Animal House. A cultural touchstone, three years before the inception of MTV, Reitman’s creation still apotheosizes the Spring Break state of mind — food fights, toga parties, alcohol, girls, and raunchy freedom embodied on the screen. The film sparked a series of slovenly imitations during the eighties, which upped the ante on the gross-out level, challenged good taste wherever it existed, and kept the excessive humor as sick as possible.

Now, over twenty years after Animal House, Reitman has teamed up with Todd Phillips, whose previous work consists mostly of punk documentary, to create Road Trip, a funny, vulgar, and likable descendent of those previous gross-out ‘80s comedies. Road Trip doesn’t stray too far from the tried-and-true patterns of its predecessors, even including the same recognizable character types that can be found in Gorp, Private School, and, more recently, American Pie. They’ve got the nice-guy college student, the preening party animal, the sensitive, brainy guy, and the naive dork (who, of course, owns the car) — four friends whose antics and adventures are narrated by MTV’s spastic Tom Green (“He’s Just Plain Nuts!”).

The presence of the reptilian Green, reprising his typically disgusting (but hilarious) antics, acts as a commentary on the big difference between Road Trip and Animal House. When the latter film was released, it was breaking taboos, taking on the Man, rowdy and raucous till the last keg is empty. But now that gross-out comedy has triumphed, the status quo belongs to the tasteless and intensely funny Green, toilet humor has left intellectual satire behind to rot, and The New Yorker writes glowingly about South Park. This provokes a larger question: How long can the Spring Break genre retain its humor, now that good taste is dead and buried?