PCU: What Are We Even Doing Here

Even into the '90s, the outsized legacy of Animal House loomed large with barely-hidden ripoffs like Glory Daze or PCU swapping boomer party culture with detached Gen X scepticism. As discussed during my McConaugheMay challenge/exercise in public suffering, Glory Daze is mostly fine, and greatly buoyed if you were born in Santa Cruz during the 1990s. I highly recommend watching the film with that life experience if you can. 1994’s PCU, on the other hand, is endlessly grating, offensive in tired ways, and feels like an eternity even at only 80 minutes.

Directed by Hart Bochner (a character actor who had never directed a film before this) and written by Zak Penn (Elektra, Free Guy) and Adam Leff (Bio-Dome), the film follows Tom Lawrence (Chris Young) as a pre-freshman at Port Chester University who finds out that rather than the preppy fraternity of white dudes he was hoping to join up with, the campus is filled with slackers, partiers, feminists (called womynysts in this for some reason), and minorities. As his assigned guide Droz (Jeremy Piven) explains to him, political correctness is ruining the school and only a kicking party can raise enough money to save their frat house from both protests and David Spade’s clan of College Republicans.

It's a premise that would have aged poorly no matter who was behind the camera or how carefully they delivered the jokes—it's hard to really get mad at a looming specter of "political correctness" with everything that's currently happening in the world. Federal grant applications ban the use of "pollution," "Black," "climate," "women," among a myriad of other inarguably useful terms. Every day brings with it a new horror, nearly every monster with a finger on the wheel is driving us off the cliff. Beyond my own disdain for anyone being asked to adjust their language to avoid harm, I cannot even empathize with someone whose biggest daily problem is that a teenager sometimes scolds them for not using the right terminology. That is a child's issue.

And speaking of children, it is an unbelievably strange choice to cast Jeremy Piven as the cool guy college slacker. The character is meant to be about 25 (having stayed in college for 7 years), which gave the casting director at least a little bit of leeway in casting older than early 20s, but Piven, even at 30, looks like a dad on his way to the used car lot to buy a car for his kid. His hairline's receding like it's retreating from a losing battle, his snappy banter feels like the "hello, fellow kids" joke played entirely straight, and he's swagged out in the finest plain T-shirt and jeans that a middle-aged thrice-divorced deadbeat dad can afford. It is, put simply, a rough ask of the viewer to view him as a youth, let alone a counter-culture rebel worth following.

Arguably worst of all, there are no laughs to be had in this space. It is pure "please clap" comedy, jokes existing purely for a sympathetic audience to nod along and agree about "kids these days." One would think that 80 minutes of runtime and a plot that barely even gestures at conflict would contain ample time for punchlines, and yet… David Spade and Jessica Walter play minor parts (despite being the antagonists of the film) and visibly do their best to elevate whatever thin material they have, but they're left to flounder.

The visuals also offer nothing. Harsh camcorder-esque footage and poorly composed shots run rampant and the only bit of interesting friction I could rub my grasping hands on was a strange tendency to highlight actors' mouths and lips in full frame. In my bored agony, it almost felt Doris Wishman-esque, isolating body parts with the camera to the point that it becomes alien. Was it a visual motif meant to hint at how political correctness in the film is merely lip service? Impossible to know.

If there is any reason to watch the film (and I'd be hard-pressed to argue for any), it might be for the shock that they actually got George Clinton to appear and perform a concert. Apparently, it was meant to be Nirvana, which seems insane, but I guess credit has to be given for the ambition. Also of note is Jon Favreau as a dreadlocked-stoner giving the kind of performance that would make Terry Kiser in Weekend at Bernie's jealous.

I can think of no reason for anyone to watch this, and I can think of no real justification for why I watched this other than to say it was not my idea. All I can say with some relative certainty is that whatever bit of distraction reading this review offered you, it would be superior to watching PCU.