In the Army Now

By 1994, Pauly Shore was mid-run in his five-film leading-man streak — after Encino Man (1992) and Son in Law (1993), before Jury Duty (1995) and Bio-Dome (1996) — and In the Army Now was the concept comedy at the center of it. Directed by Daniel Petrie Jr. and released by Hollywood Pictures on August 12, 1994, it knew exactly what it was: a war comedy that lived or died on the inherent ridiculousness of its hook.

The hook: Bones Conway (Shore) and his buddy Jack join the U.S. Army Reserves to bankroll their dream electronics store, lured by the recruiting slogan "One weekend a month, two weeks a year." Bones picks water purification as their specialty because it sounds combat-proof, and their crew embraces the nickname "the Waterboys." Then Libya starts planning an invasion of Chad, the reservists get called up for real, and the weekend warriors end up lost in the desert — captured, escaped, and somehow finishing a Special Forces mission by blowing up mobile Scud launchers. They come home heroes. The supporting cast — Andy Dick, Lori Petty, David Alan Grier and Esai Morales — sold the absurdity with the commitment of people who understood exactly how silly the movie was. Shore, for his part, actually went through the Army's water-treatment training to understand the job, turning method acting into its own kind of joke. The production was real-military adjacent throughout: basic-training scenes shot at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, water-purification training at Fort Lee, Virginia, and the desert war filmed around Yuma, Arizona.

It grossed $28.9 million — the fourth-highest-grossing Pauly Shore film, behind Encino Man, Son in Law and A Goofy Movie — and critics shrugged. What it became instead was the quintessential mid-90s cable artifact: the movie you stumbled into mid-scene on a Saturday afternoon and somehow couldn't turn off. Nobody chose In the Army Now. It was simply on, always, and that's how an entire generation ended up able to recite the water-boy scenes from memory.