Pledge Class

It's great Vinegar Syndrome keeps unearthing forgotten b-movies. Here (meaning Finland) most of their releases are not just obscure, but films that were never released at all. Although I must say the excitement of seeing something new makes the experience kind of fragile. You forget a bit too easily that most of these titles are straight from the bottom of the barrel.

That being said, Pledge Night is not that bad, or at least not in the same pile as their worst releases. The actors actually feel like students, they have a chemistry, the movie has a point and an understandable structure and the sets feel believable plus there's surprisingly many outdoor shots, which boost up the mood since there was a snow blizzard during filming. The original soundtrack cues and Anthrax songs fit in nicely plus Joey Belladonna plays a cool cameo.

Considering the budget, the effects are pretty cool and creative too, although you can tell how they've made most of them. I'm not sure if some of the effects shots were never re-discovered or if the budget just wouldn't budge, but they set up some of those scenes so the viewer is waiting for it to escalate, but then cut into something else, which is a bit of a drag. Surprisingly some of the frat boy stuff is actually more gross than the bloodshed, and it's been reported that writer Joyce Snyder researched the subject thoroughly, so that part of the suffering was real!

So if you go in with zero expectations and realize that what you're seeing isn't exactly spectacular, it is an enjoyable horror comedy. It feels like they really tried to get out the best of it and had a lot of fun.

A frat house is attacked by the ghost of a pledge that was accidently killed years ago during a prank on pledge night. Never has homosexual undertones ran so rampant in a slasher film. The guys are given spankings throughout, forced to particpate in all kinds of sadomaschtic activity, wear jockstraps, and have various objects put up their anus. Anyway, back to the film's merits, which it doesn't have any of. It doesn't have scares, the humor falls flat and despite attempts to be creative with the murder sequences, the lackluster direction stops them from working.

Anthrax were always the most playful of thrash metal's 'big four', so it wasn't a big surprise for me to find that supernatural slasher flick Pledge Night, in which Anthrax singer Joey Belladonna has a blink-and-miss-it cameo, is far from serious. In fact, the first 40 minutes or so comprises almost entirely of juvenile hell week pranks perpetrated on new pledges by the brothers of the Phi-Epsilon fraternity; there's no horror whatsoever! All of this is really quite tedious and not in the least bit amusing, so it's a relief when the blood finally begins to flow, no matter how cheesy it all happens to be.

The fun really starts when Phi-Epsilon brother Dan (Arthur Lundquist) becomes possessed by the spirit of Sid, a fraternity pledge who died twenty years earlier when a hazing prank went horribly wrong. Controlled by the malevolent spirit, Dan kills a bloke sat on the toilet, stabs another in the back with screwdrivers, electrocutes a girl in the bath, rams a food whisk down another's throat, and blows up some poor sap's butt with a cherry bomb. These deaths are relatively gore-free, but the film eventually delivers a few cheap but entertaining splatter effects after Sid emerges from Dan's back, Freddy Krueger style, and goes in search of more victims: we get strangulation with large intestine, an exploding stomach, a 180 degrees head twist, and one victim who is killed by having his head pushed into Sid's gaping stomach wound!

On top of all this incredibly silly horror nonsense, Pledge Night also manages to deliver that other staple of the genre, gratuitous female nudity, serving up a grand total of six pairs of breasts, and a metal thrashing mad soundtrack courtesy of… you guessed it… Anthrax!

3/10 for the woeful hazing antics of the first half; 6/10 for the second, horror-packed half. That's an average of 4.5/10, rounded up to 5 for IMDb.

I'm of two minds when it comes to the smash hit horror-comedy "Pledge Night". One the one hand, it's sloppy, cheap looking, and they seemed to make the story up as they went along. But on the other hand, it has a cherry bomb exploding in a man's buttocks. So I can't make up my mind as to whether I like it or not.

It's about these guys who are trying to get into a fraternity. The hazing scenes, which take up the first half of the movie, are pretty funny. There are cherries up the butt, bug-eating, butt-paddling, poop-licking, and butt-branding. (This movie is very obsessed with men's anuses. A good drinking game would be to sip whenever a guy's butt is shown or talked about, or whenever something is put inside a guy's butt). There are endless conversations about hazing and the meaning of fraternities, peppered with lots and lots of statistics. About forty-five minutes into the movie a Freddy Kreuger-rip off named "Acid Sid" shows up and starts killing the characters. Sid is really dumb. He first appears as a hand in a toilet, which should clue you in to the level of terror in this film. Sid is supposed to be the vengeful ghost of a guy who was killed in a botched hazing prank twenty years earlier. He's also a hippie, so while killing he makes "funny" 60s wisecracks like "Where's the protest?" and "This one's for Spiro Agnew!". (Why would a hippie be joining a frat anyway?)

As stupid as Acid Sid was, I think I liked this movie more than I hated it. All the guys playing pledges are hilarious. My favorite was Silvera (instead of drinking an initiation epicac, he suggests "We could stick it up our @ssh*les, or rub it on our hair and bodies!"). Dirty Pledge Richard Goodman was funny too. Try not to laugh as he wanders around whispering "BODINE?" really loud, while looking straight at the camera. The key appeal of these characters is that they're all played by actors who look like regular guys with 1980s hairstyles. They all look like they could be cruising around my neighborhood in a Camaro, blaring Whitesnake on their way down to the Twist-n-Creme. The women in this movie also look like normal, small-town gals (The female lead is built like a hockey player). This has a certain appeal as well, until they start getting naked. These women should be dental assistants or supermarket check out workers, not showing me their yummies in a horror movie! And I could have done without the world's oldest stripper, who appears in a party scene in which she hits a guy on the head with her gigantic breast (the guy looks and acts just like the Club Scum MC from "Hobgoblins").

In conclusion, this would make for a good evening if watched in conjunction with another, better horror flick. You could enjoy the good movie, then enjoy the first half of "Pledge Night" and doze off whenever Acid Sid is around.

The producers Shapiro/Glickenhaus, who were also responsible for one of my all time-trash favorites (Frank Henenlotter´s "Frankenhooker") made another "Friday"-rip off possible, which is better than most of the reviews say about it (What does not mean that "Pledge Night" is a good film!)...

The story is about a sadistic student´s establishment-ritual, where the newcomers have to drink from toilets or get branded... (That´s the first half of the film..!). One night however the monstrous Acid Sid, who looks like Alice Cooper with a cauterized face, returns and starts to take bitter revenge, because the trick they played on him about twenty years ago has been a little bit too deadly!

Probably the most interesting fact is that Joe Belladonna, former vocalist of the US-Speed Metal-Band Anthrax, has a small role. The rest is business as usual: some dumb youths get killed one by one, just with the difference that you mostly don´t see the murder, only the results... The most grotesque death is when a guy is strangulated by a spine.

It´s okay to watch "Pledge Night" one time, if you haven´t seen it you won´t miss anything!