The completist in me had to do it.

It didn't start off as a Meatballs movie. It began as a comedy-drama called Happy Campers and was rebranded during production.

By this fourth entry in the franchise, nobody was pretending it was really about summer camp hijinks at all. A struggling business, a rival owner circling for a buyout, and a water-ski instructor called back to save the camp: the plot is a formality holding together whatever gags fit the runtime.

MEATBALLS 4: TO THE RESCUE (1992) stars Corey Feldman as Ricky Wade, hired back by his old summer camp to boost sagging enrollment. The camp's money troubles leave it vulnerable to the owner of a rival camp who wants to buy the place and turn it into a golf course. Sarah Douglas, Ursa from the Superman films, plays the antagonist. The two sides settle things with a winner-take-all water-ski competition.

Jack Nance, familiar from Eraserhead, turns up as camp owner Neil Peterson, a strange bit of casting in an otherwise disposable teen comedy. Bentley Mitchum plays Kyle Linck.

Meatballs 4 shares little with the original 1979 film beyond the title and the setting. It stands mostly as a time capsule of video-store comedy at the tail end of an era.