Pledge Night

It will not shock you to know that a D-level slasher made in 1990 is terribad. I was hoping for so-bad-it’s-good, but I was prepared for just bad. No. It’s worse. Profoundly worse. It’s surprising how awful this is, and on how many levels. The script is a war crime on two levels. On a basic storytelling level, it is a movie of two halves, both painful in how drawn out they are. 42 minutes of this 85 minute movie are spent enduring a group of frat pledges during rush week, as they’re hazed and abused. There is no prologue murder to set up the killer. No teases of the killer. Just hazing. Endless hazing. When it FINALLY changes to a slasher, it starts off supernatural, then pivots to having a guy who looks too nerdy to be an accountant be the killer, then back to supernatural. It never established the rules of the killer, what they can and cannot do. He kills the frat guys, the sorority sisters who hang with the frat guys for the purpose of … being there? Helping with the hazing? And he kills the other pledges because … hell if I know. And that’s kind of important because it turns out he’s there to protect one of them because it’s the son he never got to meet, a reveal the movie wants you to think is a twist, assuming you have the IQ of a park bench. But the pledges weren’t hurting the main character, so … hell if I know how it makes any sense. The other way the script sucks is dialogue. Terrible, cliche-ridden garbage at the best, nonsensical at its worst. There’s a scene where the killer dispatches someone by breaking their neck and spinning their head around 180 degrees, then says “that’s for Spiro Agnew”. The killer is a hippie who died in 1969 in a hazing gone wrong (why a hippie was pledging a frat is never explained). I know Nixon and Agnew weren’t popular with hippies, but the dude had just gotten into office, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Never mind that WHY IS BREAKING SOMEONE’S NECK ABOUT SPIRO AGNEW?!? But hey, there’s plenty of times you can’t even hear the dialogue because the sound mixing was done by, I’m assuming, throwing levers at random, because the score drowns out the dialogue. And while I enjoy Anthrax — who provides some non-score music to the movie — their inclusion makes no sense whatsoever. None of their songs fit the moment, musically or lyrically. Despite being written and produced by a woman, this movie has a male gaze that is downright childish; every sorority sister gets topless, including the main girl. At least five women in total, plus shots of topless posters and porn magazines. I like tits, but the level of immaturity here is tacky and amateurish. But that goes with the overall direction, which is a masterclass in doing everything wrong. There’s a tight shot of a girl sitting on the stairs. She gets up and ascends the staircase. Does the camera follow her, or zoom/dolly out so we can see her ascend? Or does it cut to her upstairs? No, but the camera does stay put for a good five seconds while we HEAR her ascend. Or the 30 seconds of someone walking up to a house, knocking on the door, and waiting for it to be answered in real time, half of which is at the door waiting. It is astonishing how incompetently this thing is. And the acting … well, people are in a movie and lines are being read. Even the gore effects are off the rack of a costume shop pitiful, and the kills are mostly cutaways. There is nothing of redeeming value here. There are dozens of worthless, nameless slashers out there and this is just one of them. It does nothing to set itself out from the crowd, and it can’t even steer into the bad and become camp. It’s just dumb.