Nearly a decade lapsed between the third and fourth installments of the Vacation franchise, but judging from the on-screen results, not enough of that time was spent coming up with fresh ideas: Both critically and commercially, this limp dud is a mere shadow of its predecessors, stringing together a series of mild jokes whose lack of daring was reflected in the film’s PG rating - and whose overall lack of imagination is summed up with a sad callback to the first Vacation’s “girl in the Ferrari” subplot.

“ Taj,” gagged Jack Mathews of the New York Daily News, “plays like a very bad combination of Revenge of the Nerds and Harry Potter.” Kal Penn got a few laughs as pandering stereotype/second banana Taj Mahal Badalandabad in the original Van Wilder, and by 2006, he’d picked up some career steam through roles in Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle and the Fox hit series House, so why not make him the focus of a sequel? As Steve Carell would learn with Evan Almighty the following year, elevating a supporting character to a starring role for a sequel doesn’t always work out the way it’s supposed to, and so it was with Van Wilder: The Rise of Taj, which managed to do even worse with critics than its widely scorned predecessor. National Lampoon's Van Wilder: The Rise of Taj (2006) 7% As Robert Abele of the Los Angeles Times warned, “If your idea of a good time is laughing with repulsion at a humpbacked Romanian nympho with a torture-loving midget dad, or tittering every time a bong appears, a darkened theater awaits you.”ĩ. Sadly, the results were pretty much the same: Transylmania grossed a reported $408,229 while earning universal scorn from critics who must not have been in the mood for a horror/comedy hybrid about college students whose semester abroad in Romania gets them mixed up with a 17th-century vampire curse. National Lampoon’s Dorm Daze scored a perfect zero with critics during its brief theatrical run in 2003, and its piddling box-office gross meant that Dorm Daze 2 went direct to DVD - but that movie’s sequel, 2009’s Transylmania, somehow returned the franchise to theaters. Jump in the Wagon Queen Family Truckster, kids - it’s time for Total Recall!

They can’t all be the original Vacation, of course, but chances are you’ve laughed more than a few times at the movies on this list. A lot has changed since the first time we met the family in 1983’s National Lampoon’s Vacation, which has us feeling nostalgic for all their previous adventures, so we decided we’d go ahead and dedicate this week’s feature to the National Lampoon filmography. With this weekend’s Vacation, Ed Helms and Christina Applegate bring the long-suffering Griswold clan back to theaters for the first time in nearly 20 years.

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