American Pie Presents: Band Camp

Review by Jason Gaston

 I really don't know where to start on this one.

It was fairly obvious that American Pie Presents: Band Camp wasn't going to live up to the other American Pie movies. For one, it debuted on DVD which is never a good thing and, for two, out of the entire cast of characters that graced the previous three movies only two manage to appear in what is little more than a small cameo and a larger more glorified cameo.

This time around, we follow the exploits of Stifler's younger brother Matt who is every bit the psychopathic jerk that his brother was in the last American Pie movie only this time he's far more irritating than Seann William Scott ever was.

The younger Stifler plays a foul prank on his school's band during a graduation ceremony and is sentenced to Band Camp by the Sherminator who is now a guidance counselor in in a very contrived cameo. At Band Camp, Matt also runs into Jim's Dad (Eugene Levy) who appears in an even more contrived cameo as the camp's morale officer. Jim's Dad explains that Allison Hannigan's character was going to be the morale officer, but she got pregnant and he took her place.

This is sad news for me because personally I always wanted a fourth American Pie movie called American Baby where Jim and Michelle had a kid but it looks like that will never happen. I guess looking at this new movie, I should be thankful.

The bare bones of the rest of the plot is that Matt Stifler wants to join his older brother in the adult film industry and to do that, he decides to place hidden cameras all over the camp to catch all kinds of naughty action that is supposed to go on there. However, during the course of his exploits, Matt grows a conscience and comes to a personal crisis as he threatens to let down the people who have grown to trust him.

Meh.

Band Camp is a waste of time and money. A waste of Universal's time and money to make the thing and a waste of your time and money to watch it. This transparent cash grab is an awkward and badly written movie that fails to garner a laugh but might just manage to make you roll your eyes several times at character stupidity and contrived situations. You think that making love to a pie was a stretch? What would you think about making love to an oboe for no real reason other than it was there? Yeah, that's pretty much the high point in this terrible movie.

Tad Hilgenbrink makes his screen debut here as Matt Stifler and, I've got to admit that he does a pretty good imitation of Seann William Scott's role. Unfortunately, an imitation is about all he can do as nothing his brought to this central character and you just end up hating him throughout the movie.

Band Camp is a cookie cutter sex comedy and, I swear, you can see the entire lazy formula develop in the first ten minutes. Even people who look to this movie for nothing more than gratuitous nudity will be disappointed as most of it comes from a computer monitor hidden behind the younger Stifler's head or just from the younger Stifler himself.

Calling this movie half-baked would be a compliment. It's a mushy pile of raw dough and uncooked apples and, if you decide to partake of it, it's your own damn fault.