‘Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar’ Is the Absurd Comedy I’ve Been Craving for Years

Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar—which is now available to rent on premium video-on-demand wherever you rent movies—is a comedy. It’s such a relief to type that word—comedy—without any qualifications. It’s not a dark comedy, or a satirical comedy, or a sequel to a once-popular comedy from 20 years ago, or a thriller with comedy elements, or, God forbid, a dramedy. No one is reconciling with the death of their dad or wrestling the never-ending dread of existence in this movie. It’s just two middle-aged women on their first vacation (Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo), one gorgeous himbo (Fifty Shades star Jamie Dornan), a couple of musical numbers, a handful of celebrity cameos, and a banana boatload of extremely silly jokes.

Ten to fifteen years ago, this wouldn’t have felt like such a revelation. In the early 2000s, Will Ferrell was fighting bears in Anchorman, Andy Samberg was shooting himself out cannons in Hot Rod, and Will Forte was having sex with his ghost wife in MacGruber on the regular. It’s true that it would have been unusual to see women, rather than men, doing things like taking a dump in the middle of a street, but that barrier was broken by none other than Wiig and Mumolo, with their 2011 Oscar-nominated script, Bridesmaids. Shortly thereafter, Hollywood grew tired of not just women in wacky comedies, but wacky comedies in general. But with Barb & Star, Wiig and Mumolo prove that comedy isn’t quite dead yet. And surely, if anyone can save it, it’s these ladies.

Barb & Star—which Wiig and Mumolo wrote, produced, and starred in, with Josh Greenbaum directing—does everything an over-the-top, absurd comedy should do. It features Wiig playing both the Barb and Star villain and the protagonist; switching between pale make-up and jet-black bowl-cut wig, and a fluffy ’90s perm and tacky cheap jewelry. It takes a beloved sex symbol—Dornan, the romantic lead from Fifty Shades of Grey—and makes him do absolutely ridiculous things, like sing a song about flicking his tiptoes to kick up the sand while he flicks his tiptoes to kick up the sand.

And it unleashes a never-ending barrage of jokes. While not all of them land, the ones that do really do—like Wiig and Mumolo’s hypothetical story for an imaginary person named Trish, which starts as a light-hearted thought exercise about Trish’s personality, and ends with Wiig and Mumolo sobbing over Trish’s cancer diagnosis and self-induced death. Even the ones that didn’t get a laugh from me the first time around keep coming back with such nonsense persistence—like the ladies’ love of culottes, a type of pants I’d never heard of—that I ended up loving it.

Wisely, Wiig and Mumolo keep the plot simple, though they don’t hold back on the weird factor. BFFs Barb (Wiig) and Star (Mumolo) leave their small Midwestern town for a vacation to Florida’s Vista Del Mar, only to find themselves in the middle of an evil plot involving poisonous mosquitos. Basically, a bitter woman with a skin disease named Sharon Gordon Fisherman (also Wiig) wants to kill everyone in Vista Del Mar because they once bullied her for her medical condition, and she’s decided the best way to do so is with poisonous mosquitos. (For which she has the antidote, of course.) It makes absolutely zero sense, but that’s part of the joke. It’s weird, bonkers, and absurd, and yet it also still follows the same story beats as a James Bond movie.

Oh, and did I mention that Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar is kinda, sorta a musical? It features two all-out song-and-dance numbers, including an ensemble number in the style of a 1950s cabaret musical, and a heartfelt ’80s ballad from Mr. Christian Grey himself. It’s absolutely delightful. You take all that, and sprinkle in a few ridiculous celebrity cameos—most of which would be a spoiler to reveal, but let’s just say that at least one is Andy Garcîa—and you’ve got yourself a classic absurd comedy. A real tit-flapper, as our leading ladies would say. As someone who hasn’t really laughed at a new movie since Borat and his daughter pranked Rudy Giuliani—and that was more of a horrified choking noise anyhow—I couldn’t be more grateful.

Where to watch Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar