John Hughes originally wanted a reunion. He had paired Chevy Chase and John Candy in National Lampoon’s Vacation and wrote the obnoxious brother-in-law role with Chase in mind, but Funny Farm got to him first. Bill Murray was still taking a break from movies, so Candy suggested his friend Dan Aykroyd. That worked out pretty well. The Great Outdoors became the perfect cabin film, the movie you were excited to find left behind at your summer rental to watch on a rainy afternoon.

Chet Ripley (John Candy, Planes, Trains and Automobiles) wants nothing more than a lazy week of fishing, grilling, and family time at a Wisconsin lake resort. His wife Connie (Stephanie Faracy, Hocus Pocus) and their two sons are along for the ride, but then Connie’s sister Kate (Annette Bening, Nyad) arrives uninvited with her husband Roman Craig (Dan Aykroyd, Ghostbusters: Afterlife) and their unnervingly synchronized twin daughters. Roman has money, opinions, and an almost pathological need to make sure everyone knows he has more of both than Chet. The lake isn’t big enough for the two of them.

Howard Deutch, who also directed Hughes’s Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful, barely bothers building a conventional plot. Instead, the movie operates like a stack of vacation stories remembered years later: subtitled raccoons, a disastrous water-skiing trip, a legendary bear, and, of course, the Old 96er. That 96-ounce steak has probably outlived more of 1988 pop culture than anyone expected.

Candy and Aykroyd are the whole show. Candy was unmatched at turning simmering irritation into comedy, and you can practically watch Chet trying to remain polite while Roman destroys his vacation one smug comment at a time. Aykroyd comes at him from the opposite direction, firing dialogue with the confidence of a man who has never once wondered whether anybody wanted his opinion. Bening, still a couple of years away from her breakthrough Oscar-nominated turn in The Grifters, is fun to watch in such an early screen role, partly because Kate feels so far removed from the performances that would eventually define her career. Faracy gets the less flashy job of keeping the family side of the movie believable while the men behave like children.

For viewers around Minnesota and Wisconsin, there’s also the pleasure of a movie that understands exactly how much mythology Midwestern families can attach to one week at a cabin. None of this is especially tidy. The shoot reportedly lasted only a few weeks in the fall of 1987, with crews attaching leaves to trees to make the location look like midsummer. Continuity gets loose (very loose), subplots wander in and out, and the movie sometimes feels like Hughes simply kept whichever vacation gag made him laugh. I’m not convinced making it tidier would improve it, because the appeal of The Great Outdoors is that it feels like a family vacation remembered through the funniest disasters. The fishing probably went fine. Nobody tells that story. You remember the giant steak, the lightning storm, the bear, and the brother-in-law you wanted to push into the lake.