"Hot Tub Time Machine" is a movie. I can't believe that it exists.When I read online that a film called "Hot Tub Time Machine" had been greenlit, and that John Cusack was attached to star, it sounded like some kind of joke.
The premise is simple: It's a hot tub, and a time machine. Four dudes go back in time. Hilarity ensues.
The movie is real. I have seen it. And it's not bad.
How the fuck is that possible? It's called "Hot Tub Time Machine"! And it isn't an abomination!
That just blows my mind.
The plot? Here it goes...
Adam (John Cusack) has just been dumped by his latest girlfriend, and his nephew Jacob (Clark Duke) lives in his basement, obsessively playing "Second Life" with all of his copious spare time.
Nick (Craig Robinson) works as a dog groomer and secretly knows that his controlling wife has been sleeping around.
Lou (Rob Corddry) is a complete fucking mess. He drinks waaaay too damn much, is a complete asshole, and hates everything except shitty 1980's hair metal bands.
Adam, Nick, and Lou are all friends, but over time they have fallen out of touch. This all changes when Lou tries to kill himself in his garage, gunning the engine in tune to "Home Sweet Home" by Motley Crue, quickly filling his lungs with carbone monoxide.
Adam and Nick visit Lou in the hospital, and to keep their friend Lou from attempting suicide again (although he swears he was just drunk and rocking out at the time), decide to take him to the place where the boys had the best times of their lives in the 1980's, the Kodiak Valley Ski Resort. Adam drags Jacob along, despite the fact that Lou fucking hates him.
When the boys arrive at Kodiak, they discover the magical land they remember has become a run-down, dilapidated shithole.
Their bellhop, played by Crispin Glover, has one arm and clearly doesn't give a shit, anymore. He just throws their bags around, looking sullen, and then has the temerity to ask for a tip.
This sets off a funny recurring gag in the film, where Lou keeps watching the bellhop in the past, waiting for the moment when he finally loses his arm.
Every time the bellhop comes close, whether he's juggling a chainsaw or getting his arm caught in an elevator door, Lou is disappointed. Back to the story...
Even the hot tub is broken, a dead raccoon decomposing in its murky water.
Not to worry! A helpful, yet irritatingly vague repairman played by Chevy Chase fixes it up, and now the hot tub glows from within like a freshly poured beer. Our heroes hop in and commence drinking obscene amounts of alcohol and illegal Russian energy drinks.
When they wake up, Lou projectile vomits on a squirrel. Our heroes slowly realize that they're back in 1986, during the Kodiak Lodge's big "Winterfest" celebration, with hair metal heroes Poison performing later that night.
This particular night is a very important one for all of our time travelers:
Adam broke up with his first girlfriend that night, a gorgeous young lady he refers to as the "great white buffalo" in hushed tones. She was so hurt by Adam, she stabbed him in the eye with a fork.
Lou got his ass handed to him twice that night by a ski partol asshole named Blaine, and the experience pretty much ruined the rest of his life.
Nick and his band performed that night, and the crowd just hated them, making Nick abandon his passion in favor of whatever his future wife wanted him to do.
And Jacob was conceived that night at Winterfest, although he has no idea who his father is.
So the story is in motion.
The hot tub is broken, and Repairman Chase drops vague hints that if it isn't fixed by dawn, then something bad will happen. Curiously, this seems to concern young Jacob more than the others.
The guys make an agreement to live through the events of Winterfest just as they occurred in 1986, so as not to fuck up the space-time continuum. But this plan quickly goes out the window as they decide that maybe they should try to fix a few things here and there.
Jacob starts to flicker, like a TV show with a bad signal, and worries that their meddling will cause him to not be conceived. But nobody else seems to give a shit.
Lou and Jacob nearly get into a three-way with some random chick. Lou is totally into it, despite his hatred for Jacob, who pulls up his pants and runs away.
Later, Lou and Nick are hanging out at a bar, talking about potential ways to take advantage of their future knowledge. Lou notices a football game on TV, and he remembers it beat for beat. So he begins making bets with the other patrons over what will happen next.
Near the end of the game, Lou makes a huge bet with a particularly sleazy patron played by William Zabka. Now you may not recognize the name, but you've seen this guy, before. He is well known for playing "that asshole" from such films as "The Karate Kid", "Back To School", "Just One Of The Guys", and "National Lampoon's European Vacation".
He had the douchebag role on lockdown in the '80's. And in "Hot Tub Time Machine", his character bets that if the quarterback doesn't throw a touchdown pass in the last 40 seconds of the game, Lous must give Nick a blowjob.
Lou agrees, of course. He's already seen the game, and knows how it's going to end. Nick is displeased. Nick is more displeased when the touchdown pass is interrupted by a squirrel covered in vomit.
What transpires is one of the funniest things I'll probably see this year. Lou on his knees in the bathroom, readying himself to suck Nick's dick, calling his manhood "impossibly black". Absolutely hilarious.
Nick passes out after this, and wakes up to find Lou standing over him, his face covered in what looks suspiciously like semen. It turns out that after Nick passed out, Lou had a conversation with Zabka, and he turned out to be a pretty nice guy.
So Lou didn't give Nick a blowjob, and the "semen" on Lou's face is simply handsoap. Funny.
Adam runs off with his girlfriend Jennie, and when he fails to break up with her, she breaks up with him. He says some unkind things to her, and she stabs him in the eye with a fork, anyway. He holes up in the hotel room, writing break-up poetry and taking a lot of drugs.
He eventually leaves the room, and runs into a music journalist named April, played by Lizzie Caplan, who popped like an overboiled sausage in "Cloverfield". They break into some gay couple's home and drink their wine and make out. Then they decide to go see if Nick's going to perform with his band, after all.
Nick does decide to perform with his band, singing "Jessie's Girl" and then "Let's Get It Started" by the Black Eyed Peas, about 17 years too soon. Apparently people in 1986 are just as stupid as people in 2003, because the crowd loves that awful, awful song. So Nick feels good about himself.
While this is happening, Lou is waiting for his friends to show up and prevent him from getting his ass kicked by Blaine and his ski patrol cronies. Being busy at Nick's show-stopping performance, his friends do not show up, and Lou gets beaten so badly that one of his shoes is knocked off.
It remains in the coutryard, lonely and blood-streaked.
Jacob runs into the mysterious repairman again, who informs him that the hot tub is fixed, and that a spilled Russian energy drink caused the breakdown in the first place. Before Jacob can ask the repairman any further questions, he disappears.
With this knowledge, Jacob sets off to find the other guys and return to the future.
Our heroes find Lou on a rooftop, singing shitty '80's hair metal and drinking. He has his sad bastard moment where he reveals that he was trying to kill himself in the garage, and he admits that he is completely miserable and hates his friends for not being there for him when he needed them the most.
Lou trips and begins to slide off the roof, and his friends form a chain to catch him. At the top, Nick is losing his grip on the rooftop, and just as all is lost, the bellhop catches Nick's arm and pulls everyone away from the brink.
This pisses off Lou, because he thought the combined weight of four men would yank his arm clean off. He does, however, commend the bellhop for his seemingly supernatural strength.
The bellhop gives them all a ride to the lodge to search for Lou's last can of the Russian energy drink, now in the hands of eeeevil ski patrol douche Blaine. Lou runs into Adam's sister Kelly, and they begin to have speedy, drunken sex. Jacob catches them and tries to jump on Lou, but he blinks out of existence.
Adam realizes that Lou is Jacob's father, and urges Lou to continue screwing his sister, despite his rather mixed feelings about the whole endeavor. After Lou plants his seed, Jacob re-emerges, and he is not very pleased with the news that Lou is his father, forcing Adam and Nick to drag him away as he thrashes and screams "You're a fucking dead man!"
Our heroes confront Blaine, who is holding the Russian energy drink. Adam attempts to get Lou pumped for his big fight, and Lou lunges into battle, Enrique Iglesias' "Hero" blaring in his head. He gets pummeled again.
Eventually, Lou does get the Russian energy drink from Blaine, and the boys get the fuck out of there. The bellhop gets his arms sliced off by a snow plow, and Lou celebrates. Adam, Nick, and Jacob pile into the hot tub, pouring the energy drink all over the energy panel.
A massive vortex opens up, and Lou decides to stay behind and be a better father to Jacob, as well as taking advantage of his knowledge of the future to better his life.
In the present, our heroes find that the Kodiak Valley Lodge is just as popular as it ever was, and the bellhop still has both of his arms.
The bellhop tells them this is because Blaine and his ski patrol buddies, chasing after Lou, came across the bellhop and rushed him to the hospital. Doctors managed to reattach his severed arm, and the bellhop is a well-adjusted, happy guy.
Other things have changed, as well. It seems that Lou created a giant internet search engine called "Lougle" (get it?), and in the late '80's founded a huge hair metal band named "Motley Lue". He also married Kelly and became a devoted father to Jacob.
Nick, fresh off his musical success at Winterfest '86, became a big-time music producer, and his wife is not giving other guys blowjobs (thanks to a profanity-laden phone call he made to his then 9-year-old wife in 1986).
Adam discovers that he is happily married to music journalist April, and is not a miserable middle-aged bastard.
And so our film ends with the guys together in the backyard of one of Lou's many mansions, toasting their new good fortune.
Never mind the fact that despite our heroes changing their lives for the better in the past, they remember none of their re-written lives when they return to the present.
Adam may be happily married to April, but he doesn't remember any of that happiness, despite their few fleeting hours together in 1986.
Nick may be a wealthy music producer with a fulfilling marriage to his wife, but he still remembers her infidelity from his past, and he has no idea how to be a music producer in the present-day.
Sure, Jacob's mom is happy (and not a slut), and Lou is an insanely rich and present father, but Jacob only remembers 20 odd years of misery. Lou may feel better about himself, but Jacob has a lot of catching up to do.
But you're not supposed to let this bother you when the credits roll to "Home Sweet Home" by Motley Lue. Because if you do let this bother you, it will slowly eat away at you, day by day, until you finally lose your mind and shoot up your local McDonald's franchise.
Don't let the many, many plotholes destroy your fragile psyche, just enjoy the ride.
All the leads do a fine job. John Cusack basically plays the straight man, but is given a few opportunities to unwind, most notably in the aforementioned "break-up poetry" scene.
Taking bong hits and eating mushrooms, the right half of his face stained with blood, he mumbles his way through the scene and weirds Jacob out.
Speaking of Jacob, Clark Duke brings a lot to the table. Great in the underrated "Sex Drive", his Jacob is not a sexually frustrated, foul-mouthed prick, but a socially retarded young man who doesn't quite know how to talk to real people.
He's the guy trying to keep the others on track, because he doesn't want to fuck with the past.
Craig Robinson's Nick is a housebroken sad sack, and he's not really given much to do. His two real funny moments in the film are the phone call to his pre-teen wife, and a scene where he attempts to have sex with a groupie because he already did in 1986, and is trying not to screw up the past.
He's good, but he should have been utilized better.
"Hot Tub Time Machine" is the Rob Corddry show. His Lou is the fuel in the film's engine, and all the big moments belong to him. He's a complete alcoholic prick, and by all accounts he should be utterly despised.
But by the end of the film, he's our alcoholic prick, and the funniest alcoholic prick since Bluto Blutarsky. Or maybe Shakes the Clown.
Either way, Corddry is the reason to see the film. His role is similar to Zach Galifianakis in "The Hangover", although neither Corddry nor "Hot Tub Time Machine" ever quite reach that film's comedic heights.
This should be his break-out role, although I always worry about overexposure.
But I saw this film for Crispin Glover. Just like I saw "Alice In Wonderland" for Crispin Glover. I am a Crispin Glover fan. His bellhop is the source of much amusement in this film, and I am happy to say that he's not wasted. His presence in "Hot Tub Time Machine" is also a nice callback to his George McFly in "Back To The Future", and I appreciated it. The bottom line: put Crispin Glover in more movies. Crispin Glover!
"Hot Tub Time Machine" is a funny movie. It's not a classic comedy, but it's never boring, and Rob Corddry makes it memorable. I had a very good time at the cinema on Friday night, despite being stuck in a room full of loud, obnoxious drunks.
But Jesus, did the '80's suck.
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