'Hot Tub Time Machine' swims in tasteless humor

"Hot Tub Time Machine" - a silly title for a movie that often lives up to it - is a blowzy, rowdy sci-fi sex comedy about three discontented buddies, sick of their current lives, who try to relive their 1980s youth on a ski lodge vacation. Instead, they accidentally go back in time to 1986 and get a chance to mess up all over again.

It's a film with a good cast and a bad high concept: a movie that would like to be "The Hangover" crossed with "Back to the Future," but instead feels a lot closer to "Sex Drive" meets "Bio-Dome."

As wish fulfillment, I thought it fell far short. Who wants to go back to the '80s, a lousy decade for movies, pop music and politics? Especially if, as is the case here for a while, you're supposed to do everything the same way you did the first time around?

The hot tubbers are played by a very talented trio: Cusack as would-be writer turned frustrated insurance salesman Adam (good insurance gag line, by the way), Craig Robinson as would-be rocker turned henpecked hubby Nick, and Rob Corddry as Lou, would-be party guy turned lonely near-suicide.

Accompanying them, for reasons that seem to be largely demographic, is Clark Duke (of "Sex Drive") as Adam's dorky but irreverent twentysomething nephew Jacob. These guys, except for Jacob, went through the '80s together and now they want to revisit the past by returning to the lodge where they chased women, chugged booze and crashed on the slopes lo those many years ago.

At first the weekend seems a bust. The ski lodge is falling apart, and the joint is about as jumping, and as funny, as "The Shining's" Overlook Lodge. But thanks to their porch hot tub, which accidentally turns into a time machine when some kind of chronological whoozit is triggered by a spilled drink, and thanks also to wise old repairman Chevy Chase, they zoom back to the heyday of Ronald Reagan, Michael Jackson and "Red Dawn."

What a blast! What a concept! Old and new girlfriends - brightly played by Lyndsy Fonseca, Lizzy Caplan, Collette Wolf and others - await. And though the three men look the same to each other, the world sees them as 20-year-olds on the prowl.

Cusack, in the actual 1985, starred in one of that decade's best sex comedies, "The Sure Thing." And "Hot Tub Time Machine" - directed by Steve Pink and coscripted by Sean Anders and John Morris (who actually did write "Sex Drive") - has some funny moments. But too often, the better jokes are swimming in lazy schtick, and slimed over with the kind of calculated tasteless comedy that gives bathroom humor a bad name.

If you're ready and stoked to go Back to the Toilet - for jokes about male bodily functions, mummified mothers, catheters spraying you in the face and a running gag about whether or when Crispin Glover, as morose bellhop Phil, gets his arm amputated - you may have a good time at "Hot Tub Time Machine."

I didn't.

The whole wish-fulfillment point of time travel movies, especially sex comedies, is usually to get a second chance at youth, to avoid making the same mistakes and to try to change things for the better. In this case though, maybe that's a lost cause. Everything that happens in "Hot Tub" in the past, present or (probably) future, is pretty darn dumb.

I'll give the movie one thing, though. It's better than "Hollywood Hot Tubs," which was a real '80s movie. But not better than "The Sure Thing."

"Hot Tub Time Machine"Rating: #9733; #9733;Starring: John Cusack, Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson, Clark DukeDirected by: Steve PinkOther: A Metro-Goldman-Mayer release. Rated R for language, nudity, sexual situations and drug use. 100 minutes