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Impressively, Hot Tub Time Machine is exactly what it sets out to be: a pointless, shameless, nostalgic exercise in chaotic crudity and dumb humor–just like the ’80s films it’s mimicking paying homage to. Oh, and it’s also pretty dang funny.

[The following is a REPRINT of the redblog review of Hot Tub Time Machine on its theatrical release this spring. Hot Tub Time Machine is now available on Blu-Ray and DVD from redbox.]

The era of your young adulthood is a lot like your ethnicity, religious preference, favorite sports team, or family—you know it’s not always perfect, but still feel warmly (perhaps foolishly) inclined toward it. Likewise, while you are allowed to make fun of it, outsiders are not.

Luckily when it comes to the ‘80s, John Cusack and Steve Pink–the star and director of Hot Tub Time Machine–were there, man. Cusack of course made his name starring in exactly the sort of disjointed odes to anarchic stupidity that Hot Tub Time Machine sets out to emulate. By which I don’t mean “respectable” films like The Sure Thing and Say Anything, but rather Savage Steve Holland’s sublimely nonsensical Better Off Dead and One Crazy Summer.

And his buddy Pink—who’s the same age as Cusack and myself—has been on hand to help Cusack work off that legacy, having written Grosse Pointe Blank and High Fidelity (as well as directed the Justin Long college comedy Accepted, which is somewhat better than you might think). Like every raunchy R-rated comedy this year, Hot Tub Time Machine is going to be compared to The Hangover, but its real DNA is passed down from that post-Porkys genre of sleazy ‘80s sex comedies like Hot Dog: The Movie, The Last American Virgin, My Tutor, and Hollywood Knights.

The plot is as simple and stupid as the title. Three 40-something pals, each in their own way spun out on the road of Life, try to recapture a little of their mid-‘80s magic with a “wild” weekend at an old stomping-ground ski resort. Cusack’s character has been dumped. The Office’s Craig Robinson feels his musical ambitions—along with his masculinity—have been neutered. And Daily Show alum Rob Corddry wound up a lonely, obnoxious guy who drinks too much, calls himself “The Violator,” and may have tried to commit suicide while gunning his car’s engine as he drank and rocked out to Poison in his garage. Clark Duke (from the Clark and Michael webisodes co-starring Michael Cera) plays Cusack’s nephew and tags along to provide Gen-Why snark.

Talk Dirty to Me

The old friends get drunk, hop in their ramshackle hotel room’s hot tub, and are accidentally back in time for Winterfest ’86 (featuring Poison!)–a pivotal party weekend where Cusack lost his way, Corddry lost his self-esteem, Robinson passed his musical peak, and Duke may or may not have been conceived. A few scenes are spent trying to goose the drama with all those dire Sound of Thunder/Butterfly Effect temporal warnings, but that narrative device is soon abandoned to focus on the sex, drugs, and cheesy rock ‘n’ roll.

Along the way the boys encounter bullying ski patrol jerks (straight out of every ‘80s teen comedy—right down to their names, Blaine and Chaz), a mysterious mystical repairman (Chevy Chase, acting as if he never left the decade), women of varying degrees of misogynistic stereotyping, Crispin Hellion Glover returning back to his own future as a guy due to lose a limb, and a magic vomit-covered squirrel who manages to… well, you’ll see. Oh, and William Zabka, of “Sweep the leg, Johnny!” fame.

Hot Tub Time Machine is brazen in its willingness to try anything for a laugh and barrels ahead wildly enough that it doesn’t much matter if some of the attempts go thud. There’s some snappy dialogue—the writers include the guys who brought you the surprisingly funny Sex Drive and She’s Out of My League—but mostly the movie serves up the de rigueur Post-Farrelly/Pie comic blender filled with bodily fluids.

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As a parody of the “Reagan and AIDS” decade, HTTM goes for the low-hanging leg warmers: neon spandex, wine coolers, and hair-band rawk. (The cheese rock is balanced out by selections from Cusack’s beloved ’80s alt-rock, and in a riff on Back to the Future, we finally learn what was responsible for one of our present-day pop-music plagues.) I did laugh extra loud at a running Red Dawn joke—I had a roommate in college who also treated the 1984 Red Menace flick as a geopolitical wake-up call.

Cusack, his weary face starting to hang-slide into Kevin Spacey territory, carries the movie’s “lost potential” pathos: nostalgia as self-medication for disappointment and regret. And Robinson is a comedy rock, reliably working that deadpan dismay he does so well. Corddry (who’s been kicking around in the back alleys of middling comedies since leaving The Daily Show) brays his hedonistic mantra to fine manic effect, and Duke (who was terrific in Sex Drive) provides counterpoint to all the spewing with his hipster-loser drollery.

It’s sad producer Cusack indulged the usual aggressively hostile “all women are nymphos” jokes and tired “homosexual panic” gags. But for all its low-brow intentions there’s a frantic energy to HTTM‘s silliness, and thanks to that relentless kitchen-sink pace the hit-miss ratio comes out ahead. Plus, it proves what some of us have always known: “Jesse’s Girl” is a brilliant pop song, no matter who’s singing it.

Hot Tub Time Machine is now available for rental on Blu-Ray and DVD from redbox.