Senior Trip is one of the last few funny movies in the National Lampoon series before they gave way to ultra cheap movies, horribly unoriginal scripts, and poor comedy.

Welcome to Fairmount High, the educational institution of a braindead student body overseen by the idiotic Principal Moss (Matt Frewer) (ala Principal Rooney, only funnier). After the amazingly funny team of D'Agastino and Reggie's plans for a senior class party at the prinicpal's house lands them and some of their buddies in detention (I don't know why the selected few were the only ones to get busted). Only shielding themselves from a harsh punishment by reasoning that somehow the school system is responsible for their troublemaking ways, Principal Moss gives them an assignment: write a letter to the government citing their grievances for the poor education system.

This is something Moss will regret later as the President receives the letter. He calls up the Senator who's state Fairmount High is in and tells them to send the class up to Washington because these kids are going to help sponsor his education reform bill. The last thing anyone in their right mind would do is stick these burnout party kids on a bus (for some Van-damage!) for a couple days. And with Tommy Chong, as "Red" (named for his immunity to horse tranquilizer as he demonstrates later), as the bus driver, all hell breaks loose! The President is in for a big surprise, and that's exactly what Senator Lerner wants. Once he meets the group of misfits, especially Miosky (Eric Edwards) the silent bonehead chow hound, he knows that their appearance before the committee will pull support from the President's bill, and permit him to introduce his own education reform bill.

Meanwhile, Dag's slow talking pothead friend, Reggie, is being chased by a psychotic Trekkie crossing guard, Travis (Kevin McDonald), who Reggie earlier insulted, adding a hilarious subplot of the deranged wacko dressed in the Captain's uniform and carrying a blow-up doll who just won't seem to leave Reggie alone.

The movie, albeit an incredibly stupid plot, it is outrageously funny, watching Dags, Reggie, and the gang foil Principal Moss's plan to keep these misfits from causing too much trouble. Besides Dag's, the arsonist, and Reggie, his spaced out friend, there's Virus, the horny Audio/Visual geek; Wanda, Reggie's equally spaced out girlfriend;, Lisa, the brain; Herbert, the guy who is in perpetual mourning; Meg, the lesbian; Steve, the preppie jerk who gets his just deserts; Miosky; and Carla, the nymphomaniac.

These kids do everything from locking their principal in a flooding convenient store bathroom to steal beer, to drugging their principal and chaperone, a timid math teacher, to throwing a rad party in a crude man's huge hotel room. It is one of the better teen comedies you'll find in the late 90s and one of the last few National Lampoon movies. I recommend checking it out.

On one level, this is a really horrible movie that tries to make heroes out of slackers, potheads and social rejects, but on another more subliminal level, the kids in this movie are like the largest comedy team ever seen. They're not funny, they're interesting to watch. Jeremy Renner is the ringleader, an under-achiever who has accepted his limitations and blindly corrupts logic to break the rules. He should have been a break out star, but the direction doesn't explore his comedic chops and he is forced to mug, grimace and cow tow to the rest of the cast. The true funny presence to watch is character-actor Kevin MacDonald as the psycho Trekkie with a chip on his shoulder who wants to takeout Renner's character for years of psychological abuse; he's the one to watch here as he goes through abuse after abuse and realizes the things he learned from "Star Trek" don't help him in the real world. Matt Frewer is wasted as an exasperated, harried and frustrated principal stuck in one mode as the kids push him over the end; he's pretty much the kids patsy and victim from one end of the movie to the other. Eric Edwards plays a forced Belushi clone: an sleepy yet vice-driven imbecile without morals, but without any of the charm, humor or presence of John or Jim Belushi. (To see him now, you'd never expect he was the same actor!) Tommy Chong is stuck in the same one-joke cliché role he plays in every movie: a conspiracy-talking pothead who is his own worst enemy. It's a shame he's written off so early; investigating his life would have been more interesting. My favorite character is Carla Morgan played by Tara Charendoff; she oozes sex and kittenishly moves through the movie possessed by Marilyn Monroe showing off the full range of her acting ability. The plot is weak; it runs like a documentary of high school rejects attached to a loose sequence of comedic criminal events and unfunny disasters filled with a huge cast of unknowns. Only Charendoff and Nicole DeBoer would go on to any greater success. It lacks the spirit of "Animal House," the humor of John Landis or the commentary of Harold Ramis, and yet, you wonder what sort of damage these kids could do somewhere else and there, there is the one saving point of this film that you wonder what happens to them next.