Shot in 1988 and released straight to video in 1990, Pledge Night is a college-themed slasher that pitches itself somewhere between Animal House and A Nightmare on Elm Street.
The action takes place during “hell week”, a time for new students to pledge themselves to the various fraternities on campus by participating in a series of wild and often very homoerotic hazing rituals. After taking part in the “cherry race”, in which two teams of jockstrapped young men use their buttocks to pick up a cherry and transport it across the room and back as many times as possible (the losing team eats the cherries), the pledges attend the “pig party”, where the aim is to “get with” the plainest and unattractive partner. Two boys take a girl to the “boom boom room”. There’s a stripper who appears to be about 70 years old. One chap is bopped around the face by an errant flopping knocker. You get the sort of thing we’re dealing with here. 1990 was a whole other time and place… The hazing continues in similarly unpleasant and cruel ways for the entire first half of the film, until the real threat makes itself known – a pledge was accidentally killed in this very house 20 years ago and, for reasons that are never really explained, he’s managed to come back from the dead to seek revenge.
There’s a crazy amount of nudity and general crudeness, as you’d expect from a frat-house horror, and the humour might not fit in with modern-day sensibilities, but Pledge Night does contain pretty much everything you could want from a throwaway romp of this nature. A simple setup, a bunch of characters to root for (and against), a fun (if underdeveloped) villain, and lots of ridiculously over the top deaths with gruesome (and always-welcome) practical effects.
Over in the extra features, there’s an hour’s worth of interviews with the cast and crew; director Paul Ziller (later responsible for a glut of TV movies with names like Stonehenge Apocalypse and Yeti: Curse of the Snow Demon – you know the type…), screenwriter/producer Joyce Snyder, and pledges Robert Lentini and Arthur Lundquist. Pledge Night may not be a well-known movie, but nonetheless it’s still fun to hear about the makings of a low-budget film from the tail end of the 80s. There’s also a very brief (3 minutes) tour of the filming locations at New Jersey’s Rutger University, and a theatrical trailer.
This edition of the film (and extras) is a direct UK reissue of a previous 2019 US-only release. If by some chance you’ve tracked that one down already, there isn’t really any reason to pick this one up as well. For anyone else though, Pledge Night definitely won’t change your life, but it’s still an entertaining slasher to pass 90 minutes of your time with.
Release date: April 26th
