Pledge Night

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.

In 1968, a young hippie frat pledge was killed in a hazing mishap, burned to death in a tub of muric acid. Two decades later, his demonic corpse returns to the frathouse during "Hell Week"(wherein hazing rituals take place). As bodies pile up, the new pledges are left to determine if the grisly goings-on are a terrible reality, or just a mean-spirited prank intended to further debase them.

The first half of this gonzo slasher mess is devoid of horror elements, and plays out like an edgy gay porn flick with a hazing theme(okay, let's face it...there's always been serious homocore in the whole fraternity thing anyhow). I think it's safe to say that this is the most ass-happy horror film of the ages, and even features a death scene which involves a small explosive lodged in a dude's ripe punani. Once the bloodshed starts, however, there's actually some fun to be had here(and the sheer lame-brainedness of it all is clearly intentional). Don't expect a high quality product(like you really would, right?), but if you put your brain on pause for 90 minutes, you might find yourself enjoying this slice of very 80s cine-crap. 4/10

Pledge Night isn't even a B-movie. It's worse. Apparently, the writer had only written porn before and it shows.

I watched it for two reasons: the setting and the soundtrack.

As a "townie" and Rutgers alum, I appreciated the scene in Greasy Tony's, a now gone New Brunswick, NJ landmark. It was cool knowing they filmed it right down the road from me, although I knew nothing about the movie until now.

Anthrax providing the soundtrack was my other reason for watching. There were a few familiar tunes and I enjoyed lead singer Joey Belladonna's cameo as pre-acid Sid.

Need 22 more characters......

Pledge Night (1988) is a really good cult horror movie.The film is about Larry Bonner, a young college kid trying to get into this fraternity. He becomes friends with the other pledges as they all go through "hell week", but once Larry's mother finds out that her son is being hazed, she tries to tell him to leave the fraternity. Larry's mother tells us her boyfriend, Sid, died in a hazing over 20 years earlier. Larry does not listen to his mother, until the ghost of Sid returns to wreck havoc on the fraternity. See, you should always listen to your mother! The first 45 minutes are very funny as the pledges have to do very "entertaining" games and rituals, such as the "cherry race". As I said, the first 45 minutes of the film are amusing, it's like watching Animal House or Revenge Of The Nerds. But, after the 45 minute mark, the film turns into your typical 1980's slasher film (which is just fine!)complete with fairly gory special effects. This movie is hard to track down on vhs, but you can find a so called "uncut" copy on pal dvd through Dragon Entertainment.

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.