Pledge Night
In order to become a member of a fraternity, the applicants have to go through initiation rituals to show their loyalty. Way back in the 1960s, someone played a nasty trick on the student Sidney Scheider: He had to take a bath in a tub filled with cornflakes and coffee grounds, vinegar and even more disgusting substances. Nothing unusual so far but someone had replaced the water with pure acid. Sidney was seriously wounded and died a horrible death. This year Acid Sid returns with a vengeance, killing everyone who comes his way. One by one is slaughtered and in the college hell breaks loose.
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- Cast:
- Will Kempe , Joey Belladonna , Cassandra Delaney
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Reviews
To me, this movie is perfection.
Sorry, this movie sucks
Fantastic!
The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.
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.
Pledges find out that "Hell Week" is nothing when they are trapped in a frat house with ghost killer Acid Sid, a 1960s hippie who was accidentally killed in a pledging ritual gone bad. Now what a hippie was doing pledging a fraternity is another question. This is one of those 80s horror flicks that is just there for the killing and from a porn producer trying to go legit. The Sid stuff is semi-interesting, but never fully explored in favor of pledge initiations. It is also never explained/shown how he came back to possesses a dude, only to later burst through his stomach in DEMONS-esquire fashion. Sadly, lots of the gore (highlighted in the pages of Fangoria) was cut for the US home video release. So you will have to continue to hope a film does "Death by eggbeater" justice. The film ends with a silly bit with the hero pledge finding out Sid is his father and the ghost was just back to protect him. In the 60s flashback, Sid is played by Anthrax singer Joey Belladonna (someone else plays him later under all of the burn make up). Belladonna's band also supplied some tunes, which seem to have been crammed in and don't fit the scenes they play over at all. As a film, this carries on the long horror tradition of fraternity brothers and pledges being offed. Which, of course, begs the question, "Who would win in a fight - PLEDGE NIGHT or RUSH WEEK?" My money is on HELL NIGHT, suckas!
I had the misfortune of watching PLEDGE NIGHT on video. It's such a terrible movie that it makes BLOODSUCKING FREAKS look like MASTERPIECE THEATRE. The entire cast was uniformly homely. They should all have worn paper bags over their anonymous heads. There are good bad movies, like PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE which is entertaining despite its total ineptitude, and then there are the really bad movies, which are just terrible and not entertaining for one second in their absolute awfulness. They are the worst of the worst, and PLEDGE NIGHT easily makes it in my top ten list of the worst of the worst films. Putrid junk.
A frat house, during hell week, is attacked by a pledge that died in a hazing accident more than twenty years ago. Though there is some creative effects and deaths, this isn't as much fun or enjoyable as other slasher films. This film was made by people who used to make porno's and had to be cut to avoid an X. Another complaint- too much male nudity and not enough naked girls. 4.5 out of 10.