Animal House

If you have only seen this movie on TV, you have not really seen this movie. One of the best movie experiences of my life was seeing this movie in the theater with a full house of college students. I have never heard an audience laugh so hard, and I was laughing with them. That experience can never be recaptured. I don't know why this movie doesn't make the midnight movie tour in college towns. That way it might have some of the same impact. Also when it came out in 1978 it is hard to explain how big John Belushi was unless you were there and saw it first hand. It's still funny on the small screen, but only if you see it uncut. Never watch it on a network, they cut out most of the jokes!

Yep, it must be Animal House!

The classic frat comedy of all time. A simple story of college life for a bunch of delinquents who seek solace with a an endless supply of beer, toga parties and loads of young girls.

It doesn't matter that the Delta House (the home of said delinquents), continually fail to pass their exams, for them sex & booze is all what life is about.

The movie is a perfect vehicle for Saturday Night Live star, John Belushi, who is allowed to show off his considerable talent as the biggest sicko of the Delta bunch - check out his impression of a Zit!!

But he is well supported by Tom Hulce, and surprisingly Donald Sutherland as the hippy professor with wayout theories.

Able actor, John Vernon, plays the Principle of the college and often the butt of the Delta House: finding a horse in his office is a classic piece of farce!

All in all, the film hangs together very well with a good script and superb visual jokes. John Landis must have a wild college life himself when he made this.

***/*****

There was American Graffiti a few years earlier but Animal House set a standard of frat pack comedies with tits and ass that we still see today with the American Pie films.

The film is set in the early 1960s as the college Dean Vernon Wormer wants to remove the Deltas from the campus due to repeated conduct violations and low academic achievement. Of course the Deltas will include almost anyone in their house and is a haven for misfits in contrast to the Omegas who are clean cut, smug, privileged as well as exclusive who will have nothing to do with people who are fat, ugly, poor or coloured.

The screenplay and comedy was fresh for the time and the characters played by Tim Matheson, Peter Riegert, Tom Hulce have been imitated by others since then. In fact Tom Hanks very much copied Matheson's character in the 1980s.

Used sparingly John Belushi gives the loudest and wildest performance as Bluto and it all ends up in chaos in a parade where the Deltas have a rogue float that causes havoc.

Animal House has a messy, manic energy which its cast runs with as they know at least which direction they are heading. They blazed a trail for what followed but this film got there first.

Tasteless, politically incorrect and absolutely laugh-out loud hilarious, with a cast that's a Who's Who of later stars, including Peter Riegert, Tom Hulce, Tim Matheson, Karen Allen, Kevin Bacon, etc.

It's bittersweet watching the brilliance of John Belushi in this, his finest hour. Every twitch of his beady eyes, every jiggle of his mighty beer belly, every line of dialogue delivered with just the right amount of bluster or sneering sarcasm -- this guy was a bona-fide comic genius. He was taken from us far too soon.

Director John Landis orchestrates the escalating hi-jinks with masterful comedic precision, Elmer Bernstein contributes a very funny mock-grandiose score, and veteran character actor John Vernon provides a wonderful arch-villain as the toweringly evil Dean Wormer.

There are almost too many comic highlights; pick your own favorite. My candidates: Bluto's rousing speech about the Germans bombing Pearl Harbor, Pinto's Good & Bad Consciences battling over whether he should take advantage of his passed-out date, and Otter picking up the dean's wife in the supermarket vegetable aisle.

Watch for co-writer Doug Kenney as 'Stork', suspected of brain damage. Another Saturday Night Live alumnus, along with Belushi and Harold Ramis, he died in a hiking accident in Hawaii not too long after the movie's release. Heartfelt thanks to him and Belushi, as well as everyone else involved in this classic, for providing us with so many laughs.

You'll have to excuse me and some of the other proponents of 'National Lampoon's Animal House' if we seem a little defensive about the movie. That's because it's often not recognized as the superior comedy classic that it is. Instead, too often it is lumped in with the multitude of inferior films that it inspired, which is totally unfair.

Some of the conventional wisdom about 'Animal House' is absolutely right, though. John Belushi does give a bravura performance that is reminiscent of the great comics before him like Chaplin, Keaton (Buster, not Michael), the Marx Brothers, etc., and he does it with a wonderful economy of words. His character of "Bluto" Blutarsky is often emulated and imitated but many times the persons doing so have no idea what it was that made him and his performance so great.

Tim Matheson as "Otter" and his other frat house buddies were also prototypes that were much imitated too, and again often without success. Otter was the quintessential smooth talker, always working an angle on everybody, especially the ladies. When a woman tells him that his lovemaking wasn't that great, he cocks his head, points a finger at himself and mouths the words, "not great?" in mock disbelief. Before Tom Hanks got "Big" he made a career out of playing this character. Also John Vernon set a standard for straight men with his portrayal of the beleaguered Dean Wormer, plagued by his "zoo fraternity."

Not all of the movie's humor aims low, by any means; some of it is quite sophisticated. (Yes, you read it right.) The screenwriters and director John Landis did a great job evoking Kennedy-era America and they found a lot to laugh at. This comedy is an unqualified classic by the simplest definition-- it makes you laugh, long and loud.