National Lampoon's Van Wilder

Movie Title: National Lampoon's Van Wilder
Official Website (it might still work): National Lampoon's Van Wilder
Rating (out of 10): 9
Reviewed By: Michael Stevens
Buy the: Video/DVD \| Soundtrack
The Review:

From the folks who brought you Vegas Vacation, European Vacation, and everyone’s favorite Christmas time movie, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, we now have a college years film, Van Wilder. Of course many other filmmakers have been here, done that with this genre from Animal House in the 70s to Sorority Boys last month, and often times the humor is recycled. This humor is also almost always lowbrow bathroom humor, which is exactly the humor college guys like.

As to the story, and there is no guy named Brady, Mr. Van Wilder (Ryan Reynolds from Two Guys, A Girl, & A Pizza Place fame) is busy at college trying to complete his seventh year at Coolidge College when his dad (Tim Matheson from She's All That) finally cuts Van off. This leaves the campus party dude with no way to pay the $30,000+ tuition, and no way to pay his new personal assistant Taj (Kal Penn), an exchange student from India who hopes to lose his virginity through Van’s mentoring (also really wants to go muff diving). At Coolidge Van is by far the most popular person on campus and is well known for throwing bitchin’ parties and for getting the ladies. So in order to meet his cash crisis Van puts his talents to work to raise some capital. He starts with an enterprise called Topless Tutors that makes a ton of money before the local strip clubs shut him down. Then he starts to plan parties for the socially inept students at Coolidge for a fair price, which gets him more than enough to cover tuition. Meanwhile, the campus paper wants to do a story on Van, so they send their top reporter Gwen (Tara Reid, American Pie 2) to get the dirt. So of course this reporter is hotter than dog poop on a Phoenix sidewalk in July, and of course Van wants her, but for more reasons than just physical. So the rest of film focuses on the two’s relationship as Van courts Gwen while Gwen’s boyfriend Richard Bag (Daniel Cosgrove from Valentine) the President of Delta Iota Kappa (DIK) tries to keep his woman (plus he has a lot of his own issues to deal with like premature ejaculation). Then throw in the tough love professor McDougle (Paul Gleason, Not Another Teen Movie), the not-so-cool campus cop (Curtis Armstrong), Van’s best friend Hutch, Sick Boy (Jason Hopkins), a cameo by ChiPs boy Erik Estrada, and an ugly Reese Witherspoon look-a-like in Casey (Kim Smith).

It’s frankly rather amazing that a movie of this caliber could actually be good. But this Walt Becker film is actually quite funny and entertaining. Sure the jokes written by David T. Wagner and Brent Goldberg could have been more intellectual, but who cares, there was lots of nudity. Van Wilder is a funny movie with a cute little story (and lots of cute women) that had me entertained and laughing the whole time. Unfortunately though, I could not live with myself if I gave this kind of movie a perfect score, so I give it just nine couches out of ten.