Senior Trip (1995)

Memorable, crazy movie

Don't listen to the negative reviews

Beautiful, moving film.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

On one level, this is a really horrible movie that tries to make heroes out of slackers, potheads and social rejects, but on another more subliminal level, the kids in this movie are like the largest comedy team ever seen. They're not funny, they're interesting to watch. Jeremy Renner is the ringleader, an under-achiever who has accepted his limitations and blindly corrupts logic to break the rules. He should have been a break out star, but the direction doesn't explore his comedic chops and he is forced to mug, grimace and cow tow to the rest of the cast. The true funny presence to watch is character-actor Kevin MacDonald as the psycho Trekkie with a chip on his shoulder who wants to takeout Renner's character for years of psychological abuse; he's the one to watch here as he goes through abuse after abuse and realizes the things he learned from "Star Trek" don't help him in the real world. Matt Frewer is wasted as an exasperated, harried and frustrated principal stuck in one mode as the kids push him over the end; he's pretty much the kids patsy and victim from one end of the movie to the other. Eric Edwards plays a forced Belushi clone: an sleepy yet vice-driven imbecile without morals, but without any of the charm, humor or presence of John or Jim Belushi. (To see him now, you'd never expect he was the same actor!) Tommy Chong is stuck in the same one-joke cliché role he plays in every movie: a conspiracy-talking pothead who is his own worst enemy. It's a shame he's written off so early; investigating his life would have been more interesting. My favorite character is Carla Morgan played by Tara Charendoff; she oozes sex and kittenishly moves through the movie possessed by Marilyn Monroe showing off the full range of her acting ability. The plot is weak; it runs like a documentary of high school rejects attached to a loose sequence of comedic criminal events and unfunny disasters filled with a huge cast of unknowns. Only Charendoff and Nicole DeBoer would go on to any greater success. It lacks the spirit of "Animal House," the humor of John Landis or the commentary of Harold Ramis, and yet, you wonder what sort of damage these kids could do somewhere else and there, there is the one saving point of this film that you wonder what happens to them next.

What you see is what you get. Don't come in expecting anything but a low-brow stoner comedy. This is not Animal House. That was over 20 years ago - standards have dropped - National Lampoon ain't what she used to be. But it's still very much enjoyable, especially if you can relate to the knuckle-headed activities presented. It's dumb fun for drunks, stoners, and those who dare to be stupid. My only real complaints: 1. the whole Dags/Lisa romance - Who cares? I know that the formula calls for it but it was just a waste of time, get to the gags already! Lisa in particular was a completely uninteresting character. 2. Not enough Nicole DeBoer! Oh man is she hot in this and yet she's relegated to the background.

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)

I think just about every mate of mine has been forced to watch this, and they all loved it, can't understand why it's not a recognized stoner comedy along with Cheech and Chong etc. Half Baked was a terrible attempt at Hash comedy, this film is a 10\10 for me!