Pledge Night (1990)

 I didn't even realize I had seen this until I found these user comments. Nothing about the film stuck to the mind. I noticed a lot of folks really enjoyed the opening hour's series of hazing torment as the heads of the fraternity take great pleasure in using the grossest of gags on young men wanting, for whatever reason, to join. I have no idea why anyone would want to subject themselves to this sort of humiliating and demoralizing kind of horrible behavior. Better them than me. I never saw the point in even joining a fraternity, much less agreeably eat worms, take fireplace branding to the ass, have honey and roaches dropped on my face, watching a fake stabbing and keeping it secret as a test to the loyalty of the fraternity, eating cherries picked up by ass cheeks in a contest, and drinking a disgusting cocktail, followed by "Yes, sir" while sleeping on sheetless beds in the basement. This whole brotherhood shit...those assholes can keep it. The kind of sadistic "fun" viewers like in the opening hour of this film, found out by the writer and producer, Joyce Snyder, didn't appeal to me in the slightest. In fact, I couldn't wait for these jerks to get slaughtered, just as I did in 2012. 

There was a lot more nudity than I remembered. A trip to a strip club, magazine pictorials, and a gal bathing when one of the possessed frat brothers with a crazy laugh drops a plugged-in radio in her wet tub all have plenty of nudity. From what I gather, all the female cast in substantial roles - the girls who hang around the fraternity - are nude from the waste up at some point. That rather surprised me, because Pledge Night seems to have been made towards the end of the 80s slasher genre when nudity wasn't as prevalent as it had been in the first part of the decade.

Pretty much, from this revisit, with a great transfer from Vinegar Syndrome, debuting on Shudder, Pledge Night (1990) clearly is missing some gore (the end has the last remaining member of the frat fucking a gal on the top bunk as "Acid Sid" with the fraternity sword prepares to skewer them)...I think it's obvious this was elaborated more before the fade to black. I think Eastland's sword down Sid's throat was shown in more detail, cut because of fucking MPAA. Fuck you in the asshole MPAA. Or, better yet, take a cherry bomb exploding in the asshole MPAA. Sadly, I believe all that footage is lost, never to be found. Pity. What is left is weird prosthetic makeup to Anthrax's Will Kempe, often in closeup quite rubbery, with one kill consisting of Acid Sid choking a pledge with his removed guts (!) and another suffocating a pledge by jabbing the victim's entire head into his stomach wound (this resembled fellatio as Sid cocks his head back with this orgasmic look of pleasure on his face while the victim is forced into his stomach vagina). The frat content really seemed purposely homoerotic, which I'm guessing was Joyce's point. This really is a tale of two halves. What's funny is when you peruse the comments on IMDb and Letterboxd, many either prefer the frat hi-jinx of the opening hour or enjoy the supernatural slasher film this does become...Pledge Night really does split its audience according to what they find more entertaining. I just find this film a crazy experiment that is some sort of Frankenstein patchwork that will or will not work according to each viewer's specific tastes. Or it could divide viewers who either are waiting for the killing to kick in or become disappointed when the frat bad behavior sex comedy antics of the first half give way to Acid Sid's emergence from the stomach of cackling Arthur Lundquist. 

I was curious if the film was one of those 90s releases made in the previous decade. Reading that this was shot in 1988 made a lot of sense to me...this feels very much like a product of the late 80s. I will say, I didn't mind Anthrax music peppered throughout the film because I grew up with that hair metal from the era. But Acid Sid wasn't cast for his acting chops. He quips in that acid makeup, rubbery face when startling victims who use axes and swords against him to no effect. 2/5

Bizarre slasher really enters wtf? territory an hour in and just goes bonkers the rest of the way. When Pledge Night first starts it is basically a lengthy week-long humiliating hazing for a group of pledge students hoping to get into a fraternity. After about five minutes with these jerks who are "brothers" of their fraternity, I was hoping a psychopath, perhaps nuts because of a hazing gone awry, would start hacking them to bits with an ax. It takes a prolonged period of despicable hazing for the film to finally allow the spirit of a dead victim of a hazing gone terribly wrong (acid was used in a bathtub joke resulting in a massively burned face, screaming, and ultimately death) to break from the body of a manic-laughing fraternity brother (burst, break, split out of, tear free from a human body, whatever you want to call it) before the film is even remotely entertaining. Unless you enjoy embarrassing hazing games played on idiots who are willing to eat (among other things) cherries just picked up on blocks of ice by the crack of their asses and suffer degradation after degradation just to belong to a group of obnoxious morons who got into college thanks to having parents with money, then the first hour of Pledge Night will probably bore/tire you. Then the killer, with nasty burn make-up, dressed as a rock group roadie, "exits" a fraternity brother and commences in his slaughter. Why does he insist on not only butchering frat brothers but pledges also? Oh, he explains to the film's hero…--he just wants to help them! Shot on an obvious shoe-string, with a bulk of the movie's budget probably on the prosthetics and make-up grue showing up at the end during the kill-scenes and on the killer, this Rutger University set slasher does have that screws-loose feel to it that should gain a cult following. I think the characters suffer from severe stupidity and the storyline is all over the place, so the wretchedness of the material and all that Pledge Night entails will appeal to fans of rancid cinema. "Acid Sid", the funny nickname given to the psycho, cracks wise when he twists a head all the way around, strangles a victim with his Abdulla oblongata(!), or jams someone's face in his open stomach wound (!), with Pledge Night seeming to take Freddy/Nightmare on Elm Street as its inspiration. On bong or beer night, Pledge Night might be fun viewing, but I was on my way to snoozing before the randomness of Sid appears totally sending this movie off the rails on the crazy train. The soundtrack is mostly blaring Anthrax rock tunes and the girls in the film look like they were hired off the street. Bad movie lovers will dig this turd, me thinks. - May 12th, 2012