**** - Your average gross-out ‘guy comedy’ is made for the very simple reason that studios know they will make money off of them. Dumb guys will take their equally dumb girlfriends to see them every time they come out because they’ll get a few laughs out of it, the tacked-on sentimental bullshit ending will cause their girlfriends to be considerably more likely to put out afterwards, and everybody is happy. While “Hot Tub Time Machine” treads dangerously close to that kind of grim territory, what keeps this above the pack by a large margin is the fact that the characters and situations have very close to zero sentimental content. This movie is played purely for laughs and avoids debasing itself entirely by refraining from being too graphic with the gross-out stuff (with the exception a couple of male asses and some projectile vomit). The retro kitsch factor in this 1986-based film is rather high, but the writers didn’t always go for the easy lame joke like a lot of other movies set in that time period do (such as “The Wedding Singer” etc.). It ends up being sort of like “The Hangover” set in the past with the schmucks-with-a-heart-of-gold crap tactfully extracted. That’s probably why this wasn’t particularly successful at the box office. It also, obviously, has time travel in it, so that certainly helped keep my interest.
Hot Tub Time Machine
**** - Your average gross-out ‘guy comedy’ is made for the very simple reason that studios know they will make money off of them. Dumb guys will take their equally dumb girlfriends to see them every time they come out because they’ll get a few laughs out of it, the tacked-on sentimental bullshit ending will cause their girlfriends to be considerably more likely to put out afterwards, and everybody is happy. While “Hot Tub Time Machine” treads dangerously close to that kind of grim territory, what keeps this above the pack by a large margin is the fact that the characters and situations have very close to zero sentimental content. This movie is played purely for laughs and avoids debasing itself entirely by refraining from being too graphic with the gross-out stuff (with the exception a couple of male asses and some projectile vomit). The retro kitsch factor in this 1986-based film is rather high, but the writers didn’t always go for the easy lame joke like a lot of other movies set in that time period do (such as “The Wedding Singer” etc.). It ends up being sort of like “The Hangover” set in the past with the schmucks-with-a-heart-of-gold crap tactfully extracted. That’s probably why this wasn’t particularly successful at the box office. It also, obviously, has time travel in it, so that certainly helped keep my interest.
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