SnoReptilePlenty Memorable, crazy movie

Listonixio Fresh and Exciting

Teringer An Exercise In Nonsense

TaryBiggBall It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

SnoopyStyle Slacker Mark D'Agastino (Jeremy Renner) is chasing prudish class hottie Lisa and organizes senior skip day party at principal Todd Moss (Matt Frewer)'s house. Class president Steve narcs on them and everybody gets detention. They are assigned to write a letter about the problems with the school system to the President and gets invited to Washington. Moss and new teacher Tracy Milford (Valerie Mahaffey) chaperon the group of misfits on their senior trip with Red (Tommy Chong) driving the bus.This is fascinating to see a really young Jeremy Renner. However there is nothing too compelling about this. There are few laughs. Renner is not the flamboyant type to lead this group in a comedy. It's also interesting to have Nicole de Boer in this with Kevin McDonald playing a crazed Trekkie following the group. I'm not saying this is horrible but it simply doesn't have enough laughs.

Michael_Elliott Senior Trip (1995) ** 1/2 (out of 4)Two stoners, wanting the best for their senior year, decide to throw a party at the house of their lamebrain principal but when the big guy catches him he decides to punish everyone there with Saturday detention. Those who got caught were the previously mentioned stoners, an overweight guy who is constantly eating something, the good girl virgin, the school slut, the black guy who wants to be Malcolm X plus a computer dork who enjoys reading Playboy magazine since he can't get a real woman.In the detention center the kids are made to write a letter to the President on the current state of education in America. Of course the smart girl ends up doing the report and it turns out that the letter actually makes it to the White House and the President decides to let the kids come to Washington so that they can introduce his new education bill. They've got two days to get to Washington and the road trip begins when Red (Tommy Chong), the horse pill popping bus driver shows up and declares the party official. The next two days are full of your typical sex and drugs but when the kids learn that they are just being used for political reasons, they decide to show that they aren't dumb after all.National Lampoon's Senior Trip is without a doubt one of the dumbest, most lame films ever made. Everything from the acting to the directing to the so-called screenplay are amateurish and perhaps that's being a bit too nice. There isn't a single original idea throughout the entire film and most of the time the film tries to go all out with over the top stereotypes as well as silly party scenes leading up to a so-called dramatic ending where the losers become winners. Every single scene in this film is something we've previously seen yet we're fortunate because the film is still pretty damn funny. The term so bad it's good certainly applies to this film.What makes this bad movie work is the effort that is obviously going on throughout it. You can tell that the actors are trying their best to recreate earlier teen films like National Lampoon's Animal House and Porky's but they fail horribly in every sense yet them failing so badly is what gets a laugh from the viewer. We can look at all the stereotypes, which are seen the same way they were back in the 1980's. We've got the fat kid who does nothing in the movie except eat food. We get a dork who loves Playboy magazine yet fails to perform when a sex kitten offers him the time of his life. We get the good-girl virgin who deep down really wants to go wild with sex and alcohol. We got the bad boy who likes her and is willing to be a bit on the good side to get down her pants. We then get the dork teachers pet who deep down is a homosexual.The stereotypes themselves are very politically incorrect, which also adds to some of the charm. There's a hilarious, if stupid, scene where the teacher's pet is asked by the Principle for help and the guy gets down on his knees thinking that's the help needed. We get another scene where the overweight guy goes all out on his fantasy where he would have sex with a real Jap from China. We even get a nice porno take of Forrest Gump called Forrest Humps. If all of this sounds incredibly stupid, well it is and that's what makes the film funny. All of these jokes, as bad as they are, are being acted and directed as if they were the greatest comic lines ever written so we're left laughing at ourselves laughing at the film more than we're actually laughing at what's in the film.The biggest stab in the film goes towards Star Trek fans as one characters is so obsessed with the series that he goes all out (with his rubber sex partner) to destroy one of the senior members. There another politically incorrect scene where the Trek-nut kidnaps a Chinese family, which has to be seen to believe. Then there's the cameo by Tommy Chong, which while funny should have been a whole lot better. Sadly all the promos made it feel that he would have a large chunk in the film but he's in and out way too quickly but before he goes Chong delivers a few good pot jokes as well as a nice homage back to his days with Cheech.National Lampoon's Senior Trip is a very poor film but if you don't mind an offensive and lamebrain film then I'm sure you'll get enough chuckles out of it. You certainly shouldn't go into this thing expecting anything like Animal House and if you do you'll certainly be very disappointed. This is a very poorly made film that thankfully gets bad enough to get a few laughs. When I originally saw this in the theaters I was hoping this would be a return form to the good old days where teen comedies weren't rated PG-13 and didn't have a silly message to relay. There's no message here and the dirtiness certainly deserved the R-rating but by in large, the film is forgotten for a reason and I doubt a cult will ever pick up on it.

Pepper Anne Senior Trip is one of the last few funny movies in the National Lampoon series before they gave way to ultra cheap movies, horribly unoriginal scripts, and poor comedy.Welcome to Fairmount High, the educational institution of a braindead student body overseen by the idiotic Principal Moss (Matt Frewer) (ala Principal Rooney, only funnier). After the amazingly funny team of D'Agastino and Reggie's plans for a senior class party at the prinicpal's house lands them and some of their buddies in detention (I don't know why the selected few were the only ones to get busted). Only shielding themselves from a harsh punishment by reasoning that somehow the school system is responsible for their troublemaking ways, Principal Moss gives them an assignment: write a letter to the government citing their grievances for the poor education system. This is something Moss will regret later as the President receives the letter. He calls up the Senator who's state Fairmount High is in and tells them to send the class up to Washington because these kids are going to help sponsor his education reform bill. The last thing anyone in their right mind would do is stick these burnout party kids on a bus (for some Van-damage!) for a couple days. And with Tommy Chong, as "Red" (named for his immunity to horse tranquilizer as he demonstrates later), as the bus driver, all hell breaks loose! The President is in for a big surprise, and that's exactly what Senator Lerner wants. Once he meets the group of misfits, especially Miosky (Eric Edwards) the silent bonehead chow hound, he knows that their appearance before the committee will pull support from the President's bill, and permit him to introduce his own education reform bill.Meanwhile, Dag's slow talking pothead friend, Reggie, is being chased by a psychotic Trekkie crossing guard, Travis (Kevin McDonald), who Reggie earlier insulted, adding a hilarious subplot of the deranged wacko dressed in the Captain's uniform and carrying a blow-up doll who just won't seem to leave Reggie alone. The movie, albeit an incredibly stupid plot, it is outrageously funny, watching Dags, Reggie, and the gang foil Principal Moss's plan to keep these misfits from causing too much trouble. Besides Dag's, the arsonist, and Reggie, his spaced out friend, there's Virus, the horny Audio/Visual geek; Wanda, Reggie's equally spaced out girlfriend;, Lisa, the brain; Herbert, the guy who is in perpetual mourning; Meg, the lesbian; Steve, the preppie jerk who gets his just deserts; Miosky; and Carla, the nymphomaniac. These kids do everything from locking their principal in a flooding convenient store bathroom to steal beer, to drugging their principal and chaperone, a timid math teacher, to throwing a rad party in a crude man's huge hotel room. It is one of the better teen comedies you'll find in the late 90s and one of the last few National Lampoon movies. I recommend checking it out.

love_biscuit Usually, a big indicator that a movie is worth seeing is if Ebert and his partner (Siskel, as it was in 1995) give it "two thumbs up". Most of the time, any studio that releases the movie that gets two thumbs up will rush to print the accolade on the box of the movie when it is released to video. But if it DOESN'T get two thumbs up, there's no need to worry because there is bound to be somebody who has something good to say about a movie. I mention this because when I rented this movie a long time ago, not one review graced the cover of this train wreck. Not one. I would soon discover why.when I watched this movie I was 15 years old, so you figure I was part of this movie's target audience. But I can tell you, as a 15-year old kid, I didn't laugh at all. The movie was totally, utterly unfunny.The story follows a bunch of high school seniors who embark on a trip to Washington, D.C. A grab-bag of mindless high school stereotypes (handsome rebellious guy, anti-social guy, disgusting fat moron, smart goody-two shoes, computer nerd, promiscuous outcast) get thrown into detention and are assigned to write an essay, which will be sent to Washington, explaining the faults in the modern American education system. The smart goody two shoes, Miss Tracy Milford (Valerie Mahaffey) is the only one who actually writes a paper, and wouldn't you know, the President reads it and loves it. Enter the senior trip.I hoped that at least things would get funny here, as road trip movies usually involve unusual situations/characters. It's cliche, but who cares if it's done well, right? Well, it's not done well here. Kevin McDonald, the only person in this movie I recognized from other projects (aside from Tommy Chong in an amazingly humor-devoid role as the bus driver who is a raging drug addict) plays a weird Star Trek-obsessed crossing guard, who has a personal vendetta against one of the seniors, and chases the group to D.C. Don't ask.After a series of stupid and endless scenes, we finally end up in D.C., where the President finds out that the group of kids aren't the scholars he thought that they were. This leads to a mercilessly banal, sappy speech from the seniors about how it's too late for them, but not for tomorrow's children, or something smiliar. I can believe that one could be convinced that public education is in bad shape by parading these kids around, but I can't believe that the response solicited from such a display would be the ever popular 'slow clap', started by the President himself. After that, the movie somehow ends, but not soon enough.I identified with none of the characters portrayed in the movie. Even Tracy Milford, who at one point looked like she was above the rest of the crew, totally betrayed me when it was revealed that she had feelings for Mark "Dags" D'Agastino (Jeremy Remner, the "star" of the movie), a punk that no girl of intelligence or ambition could ever find attractive. While most teen comedies have outlandish characters, there is always at least a grain of truth to them. I was spoon-fed a series of what looked like an out-of-touch writer's uneducated guess of what they thought high school kids were. So awful was this movie that some seven years after viewing it I can still recall it well enough to review it. Most bad movies I hope to never see again. This is the kind of bad movie I hope to repress.National Lampoon's Senior Trip: Zero stars (out of four)