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Released on: N/A
Released by Shock Cinema
Director: Paul Ziller
Cast: Todd Eastland, Dennis Sullivan, Craig Derrick, David Neal Evans, Robert Lentini, Joey Belladonna
Year: 1988
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The Movie:
Back in the late sixties, a hippy named Sid (played by former Anthrax frontman Joey Belladonna - Anthrax also does the soundtrack) was boiled alive in a bathtub full of acid in a fraternity prank gone wrong. Well since then, the University has outlawed hazing but the tradition carries on in 1988 as a whole new crew of young men are about to be initiated into one of the many fraternities in the area.
The first forty minutes or so basically cover the same kind of ground as films like Animal House and the giant fart joke that is King Frat, but it doesn't do it as well. The new recruits are put through the ringer and submitted to all manner of depraved initiation rights. All the while, Bad Man Dan (Arthur Lundquist, who provides probably the best performance in the film even if he does spend most of his screen time cackling like a loon), one of the brothers, runs around acting like a maniac trying to scare them.
After the filmmakers run out of bad frat boy humor, Sid, the dead hippy who was boiled in the bathtub, returns from the grave and starts killing off the frat boys one after the other. While most people would probably not complain too much about this, seeing as frat boys are probably to blame for most of the worlds' problems, they don't take too kindly to being offed by an undead beatnik and so they all band together to try and make it out alive.
Pledge Night has more homoerotic undertones than Judas Priest's Hot Rockin' video. The members of the fraternity spend most of their time running around in their tightie whities and seem to be really into spanking each other. This part of the film is at least realistic - having lived in a school dorm populated by frat boy types, I did actually witness plenty of this sort of 'male bonding.' But realistic or not, it doesn't really make for good comedy or good horror.
The film does pick up in the last half hour though and once Sid 'the killer hippy' - yeah, hippies are pretty scary - comes back from the dead, at least the body count starts to rise and the film delivers at least on par with what you'd expect from it.
So if bad dialogue, (unintentional?) gay innuendo, cheap gore and some totally gratuitous nudity gets you going, you'll probably dig this late eighties slasher but if you want serious horror or anything that remotely resembles good filmmaking, there are far better movies to waste your time with than this one.
Video/Audio/Extras:
The fullframe presentation appears to be in it's correct OAR as there isn't really any noticeable cropping. Unfortunately, the source is obviously a VHS tape and not a particularly good one at that. There are a few scenes where there is some video roll apparent and the picture is soft and fuzzy without much detail. Colors are faded and washed out.
The film is given the Dolby Digital Mono treatment and it sounds about as good as it looks. The VHS source is evident, there is some hiss and a few spots where the dialogue levels drop a bit. You can understand it easily enough for the most part, but it doesn't sound particularly good. Removable Dutch subtitles are also included.
This disc contains a trailer for Pledge Night as well as a trailer for Death Spa, and a brief stills gallery.
The Final Word:
The movie might work well if you're sufficiently inebriated before viewing but it might not be worth the hangover you'll have to deal with the next day to get to that point. Some decent gore scenes punctuate the later half of the film, but that's about it. The audio and video are pretty bad, and the extras are slim.