A new campus comedy from the brand that three decades ago set the frat boy movie bar with "Animal House," "National Lampoon's Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj" is so blatantly not funny that it might as well have been called "National Geographic's Van Wilder 2 ...."

That's aside from the small detail that the Ryan Reynolds title character is nowhere to be seen (save for a brief glimpse of a photograph) in this subsophomoric sequel to the marginally better 2002 original, leaving Kal Penn's sycophantic Taj Badalandabad character to do all the heavy lifting.

It proves to be a daunting task, given all the naughty bits that fall with a clunky thud under the laugh track-keyed direction of Mort Nathan (the ill-fated Cuba Gooding Jr. outing "Boat Trip") from a tired, threadbare script by David Gallagher.

Having graduated from Coolidge College, Penn's Taj descends upon England's Camford University (it's been a tough year on the U.K. -- first Garfield pays a visit, now this), where he hopes to follow in his dad's playa footsteps as the resident "Sultan of Sheets" of the Fox and Hounds fraternal guild.

But when Taj arrives at the tony campus, he's informed by the guild's snotty Pipp Everett aka the Earl of Grey (Daniel Percival) that a mistake was made and that Taj actually was appointed Head of House in a rundown flat of misfits, including the English-bashing Irishman Seamus (Glen Barry), the potty-mouthed Cockney lass Sadie (Holly Davidson), the ultranerdy Gethin (Anthony Cozens) and the nonspeaking Simon (Steven Rathman).

Drawing on the deep wisdom of his sensibly absent mentor, Wilder, Taj forms a society of his own -- the Cock and Bulls -- and he and his motley crew take on the Fox and Hounds in a bid for the competitive Camford Cup.

It would have been nice if just a bit of the anarchical spirit of ol' Bluto Blutarsky had filtered down through the decades, but slacker Taj never rises to the occasion.

An actor with a proven talent for comedy, as witnessed with "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle," Penn, who also takes an executive producer credit here, wanders around halfheartedly attempting to make something amusing out of the limp shock-comedy antics, but it all just goes in one innuendo and out the other.