Wet Hot American Summer (2001)

A good friend has egged me on for years to watch “Wet Hot American Summer,” a 2001 send-up of 1980s summer camp films that is splendidly offensive and dead-on, not just of every “Porky’s” type film ever made, but camping in general, and being a dumb ass teen. The movie sports early-career Bradley Cooper, Amy Poehler, and Paul Rudd, along with Janeane Garafalo, David Hyde Pierce, and Molly Shannon. Like the very best satires, “Wet” smashes the fourth wall and plays with the audience directly. My favorite scene is a throw away: The camp baseball team forfeits the big final game because it will only end in cliché, the underdogs beating the snotty rich kids down a ways. I laughed my ass off. A-

The Perfect Host (2011)

“The Perfect Host” is a home-invasion flick – I have seen several recently, why I don’t know - - that flips the genre rules with pitch-black comedy galore, before a third-act switcheroo stumbles hard and fast. We open on a guy (Clayne Crawford) who’s just used a silly Hunter S. Thompson disguise to rob a L.A. bank, only to get robbed by a young woman at a drug store. The flummoxed guy then decides to crash a nearby house, taking a hostage. He choices an artsy-fartsy home owned by a waif of a man (David Hyde Pierce of “Frasier”) who starts out prissy weak and then evolves ape shit crazy. Oops. I won’t say more, except to repeat that the ending tanks with a character reveal that thuds like a bad game of telephone. Pearce lets loose with a twisted grin, purposefully playing off the Niles we all love. If writer/ director Nick Tomnay’s Sundance hit ended 20 minutes sooner, it could have been perfectly fun. B-