American culture probably hit bottom in 1981, what with TV series like Mork & Mindy, the music of Journey and Styx, best-selling parodies of I'm OK, You're OK, the Dungeons and Dragons fad, and high-school productions of Godspell. Throw in the inauguration of Ronald Reagan and the first inklings of AIDS and you're talking bleak.

Then again, things haven't progressed much since, as witness Wet Hot American Summer, which lampoons all the above and more with a weird combination of fetishistic reverence, rarefied irony, and stifling self-consciousness that is more funny strange than funny ha-ha. In what looks like a labor of love, perhaps of the unrequited onanistic variety, David Wain and Michael Showalter of The State (and yes, MTV first broadcast in 1981) have put together what amounts to Scary Movie in a time warp, parodying bad old movies that made little impression in the first place. Set on the last day of summer vacation two decades ago at Camp Firewood, Maine, Wet boasts a talented cast that includes Janeane Garofalo, Molly Shannon, Paul Rudd, and Christopher Merloni in a series of cliché-busting skits that range from the hilariously inane to the merely inane. A few bits, such as a montage of what the camp counselors do in an hour on the town, a minimalist motorcycle chase scene, and a very traumatized Vietnam vet, aspire to the absurdity of a zen koan. But most of Wet Hot American Summer will appeal to those who, when they say they don't make movies like that anymore, are referring to Bill Murray's Meatballs. At the Avon.