As the summer winds down and the “flowers of life” need entertaining before being shipped off to school, we’re hit with a wave of American “teen comedies.” While EuroTrip and Dorm Daze boast different directors and casts, the younger crowd will likely see them as a two-part saga. In these sagas, names and faces are irrelevant – it’s all about body parts, mostly south of the border.
EuroTrip: A Summer Vacation Digest
EuroTrip is essentially a highlight reel of “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” essays. A group of small-town, or rather, small-state graduates embark on a European adventure under a flimsy pretext. Their journey follows a predictable path: London leads to Paris, Eiffel Tower queues give way to Amsterdam’s red-light district, and a detour to Bratislava becomes mandatory en route to Berlin. The film operates on a bizarre logic where Berlin spawns fascists and the Vatican mourns the Pope’s passing. This absurd narrative is seasoned with ample sex appeal, leaving everyone in stitches. Oh, and there’s plenty of talk about penises and poop.
This brand of humor falls flat in two scenarios: chronic neurosis or a complete lack thereof. In these cases, the predictability of every situation becomes glaringly obvious, with no surprises in the plot, characters, or dialogue. The use of “Stand Up, Great Country” as Bratislava’s anthem is more perplexing than amusing. However, a furtive glance around the cinema reveals which colleagues, friends, and family members are truly immature. Some are stuck in the oral-genital phase, others in the sadistic-anal, and still others seem to be in a latent state. EuroTrip offers something for everyone’s twisted sense of humor: a character is accosted by a pedophile, another is violated with a chainsaw-like object, and twins accidentally engage in mutual self-pleasure.
Credit is due to director Jeff Schaffer for crafting EuroTrip as a glossy package with a unique label for each city. He infuses the film with dark humor, rewarding those who dig beneath the surface. However, the extensive use of CGI to recreate various European capitals in Prague (where the film was primarily shot) seems to have diverted resources from creating a truly dark and universally funny comedy. Instead of ending up in a student dorm, the graduates should have been delivered in coffins, ready for a necrophiliac finale. Alas, everyone has their own hang-ups, and Schaffer’s half-hearted decisions suggest a possible case of latent homosexuality.
Dorm Daze: The Unfunny Sequel
In the same vein of mediocrity, Dorm Daze consciously embraces unfunniness and can be considered a continuation of EuroTrip. It’s another collection of sketches, this time on the theme of “The Night Before Exams.” The same graduates, now students, find themselves in the midst of the first exam session. The directors (brothers David and Scott Hillenbrand) are forgettable. The film is shot on a single set with minimal props, costumes, and editing, and the CGI is clearly lacking. Yet, the “flowers of life” will giggle even more, as the “humor” is never dark and the “classic” jokes are worse than Rabelais and Boccaccio.
If a prostitute summoned to a virgin’s room is named Dominique, then the French exchange student in another room will also be named Dominique. If a shady character hiding in a third room pretends not to speak English, he’ll be mistaken for French and paired with the exchange student, who’s mistaken for the prostitute. If a plaid bag full of cash appears in a fourth room for contrived reasons, the prostitute and the shady character will naturally steal an identical bag from a fifth room, containing only a tube of lipstick. A black athlete in room six uses the lipstick to seduce her black boyfriend, who’s rumored by gossips in room seven to have impregnated their white neighbor in room eight.
Of course, there’s also a gay character who’s pursued by a nymphomaniac. And, in a beloved trope, the students accidentally mix up a stack of notes written in a moment of inspiration, supposedly proving their worthiness for college admission. They may struggle to write more than parallel lines, painstakingly forming letters with ink-stained noses, but none of the notes reach their intended recipients. They scatter under the doors, leading to eavesdropping, spying, fighting, yelling, and general chaos. If all these notes were compiled into a digest, Nikolai Gogol would have burned his “Christmas Eve” long before the second volume of “Dead Souls.” He wouldn’t have written anything else, and we wouldn’t have to suffer through “The Inspector General” in school. And why bother with university if you have a dorm? There are penises and poop, bags and sausages, tubes and drugs, and everyone is ultimately happy. The happiness of the “flowers of life” in this “Dorm Daze” is so blatant that it will sustain them until the next summer.
Ultimately, the only flaw of American “teen comedies” is not that they are painfully unfunny for some, but that other films occasionally appear between the end of one vacation and the start of the next, disrupting the happiness.