EUROPEAN VACATION (1985) ** Archeologists wondering what was different about the '70s and '80s might as well stop digging when they hit this film. It's not a terrible film, it's just a horrible waste of potential. National Lampoon was no longer a real magazine, but an ex-magazine producing banal movies. It had never been more than wasted potential as a magazine either, mind you, but dammit it had achieved some form of...definitely not greatness, but at least identity. National Lampoon could be relied on to disgust you, it was the grossest, most nauseating rag...far worse than anything you or I could imagine, more nauseating than what the Young Americans for Freedom were hawking, which really says something. Lampoon not only wasted potential for good, but realized potential for some very disgusting things. If this film had been made ten years earlier Chevy Chase would have lost all of the family money whilst engaging in "local customs" in Amsterdam that rendered him a wild-eyed marijuana addict, the mafia would have taken Beverly D'Angelo captive in order to cover his debts in a brothel, and the dumb kids would have spent their time debasing themselves in every which manner. Instead of that film, this one offers some dumb mis-spent time with "relatives," all the while hinting at the worst of the themes above. It's not particularly disgusting, but it lacks guts, credibility, artistic merit, entertainment value, or any particularly definitive aspect. So that's worse? Not necessarily, but in art it is.
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