Rich Man’s Van Wilder — simplicity is a good formula for a college comedy hinging mainly on stereotypes. It helps that Animal House invented most of them.

★★★☆☆

Now, before I receive a ton of angry Facebook comments, I want to remind everyone that 3 stars is not a bad review. I gave John Wick a 3 star review and you all collectively lost your minds. 2 stars is not a good movie. 1 star is a bad movie. 3 stars is where most movies fall for me. Animal House is another one of those movies that falls into that bucket of movies that I’m not upset that I sat down and watch, but I don’t feel like I need to immediately rewatch it or show it to ‘virgins’ to excitedly judge their reactions.

National Lampoon’s Animal House is a movie that really needs no introduction. If you’ve somehow never heard of this movie, it’s John Landis’s 1978 cult comedy centered around the worst fraternity house at a preppy New England-ish private school. You probably know it as the movie where John Belushi chugs an entire bottle of Jack Daniels on camera. Or the movie where John Belushi smashes some douchey guy’s acoustic guitar at a party. Or the movie where John Belushi falls off the roof of a sorority while peeping in on a topless pillow fight. John Belushi is very funny in this movie. If you don’t remember John Belushi doing any of those things but still remember them it might be from the numerous parodies (sorry about the weird dub over on this one) in other movies and television.

Movies that reach this level of pop culture osmosis have a very strange lifecycle. Going into Animal House, I knew the punch line to every joke having never seen the movie. Most newcomers will. When I told my family over the holidays that I would be reviewing Animal House, three different people parroted out a line from the movie. It’s really hard for a movie like that to stand up and almost impossible to experience it they way 1978 audiences did that helped catapult it into comedy classic status. Think about right after Borat came out and everyone walked around saying ‘My wife’ and ‘this shirt is black not’ and you got tired of it real quick. It’s not a perfect analogy, but that’s what happens to classic movies like these when they are incorporated over and over into every college movie or tv show episode that has been released in the last 35 years.

But despite knowing what i was about to see, I still found time to appreciate the classic-ness of this movie and how well it still holds up today. Landis and the rest of the cast and crew put together a tight, funny movie that is super relatable to anyone has spent time on a college campus and has really really funny jokes. That’s why we’re still repeating them three decades later. Even though I didn’t fall in love with this movie, Landis remains one of my favorite comedic directors. There’s something really impressive, especially in comedy, about making a movie that can literally span generation–my parents were 9 when this was released.