Band Camp aka American Pie Presents: Band Camp (2005)

(Netflix Streaming, March 2017) Direct-to-video American Pie series spinoff Band Camp is not what we’d call good … but it does follow the basic elements of the series from which it’s inspired. Tad Hilgenbrink turns in a Stifleresque performance as, indeed, Stifler’s younger brother, proving just as mischievous as his role model and ending in Band Camp as punishment. What follows is a typically neutered version of an American sex comedy: heavy on juvenilia and humiliation, low on actual nudity or eroticism. It’s crude and innocuous at once, happy to wallow in low jokes and idiot plotting. As background noise while doing other work, it’s almost perfect—you just need to perk up once in a while whenever Eugene Levy shows up as a camp counselor or whenever something funny threatens to happen (it seldom does, but it’s important to give the film a chance). It may or may not be noteworthy to remark that twelve years after its release, you practically can’t find any known name in the cast—for all that I liked of Crystle Lightning’s presentation as an uncommon ideal of beauty, much of the film’s cast has since, at best, peaked in TV shows. But such is the life of a direct-to-video film—Band Camp wouldn’t have a tenth of its current awareness had it not been branded as part of the American Pie series. One the flip side, I’ve seen much, much worse before.