Word: frat
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Most Predictable TV Trend: in the wake of the National Lampoon's Animal House, all three networks have announced frat-house sitcoms to premiere in early...
...summer and you didn't see this movie? What's the matter with you? Anyway, this is what you might call a very funny movie, if you can manage to disengage your refinement and prepare yourself to laugh at some incredibly sophomoric humor. This is the ultimate college frat movie, complete with sex jokes, beer jokes, dope jokes, preppies jokes, and just plain dumb jokes. Nevertheless, this story of a renegade frat at an uptight early-'60s college is a good way to spend three bucks and a couple of hours. And, you know, it even reminds me of Dartmouth...
...film's plot has something to do with the efforts of a mean dean (John Vernon) to shut down the frat house, but it is really just an excuse for a series of bits that are far too hot for TV's Saturday Night Live. We watch the homoerotic rituals of a fraternity initiation and the orgiastic excesses of an all-night "toga" party. In one funny if discomforting scene, white students show up at a black nightspot and try, without notable success, to display some soul. Animal House ends with a where-are-they-now epilogue that...
...though. He doesn't have to. The man can do more with his eyebrow than most mortal comedians can do with their whole bodies. Unlike most TV comedians, who dominate the small screen but little else, Belushi easily makes the transition on to film. His character, Bluto, is the frat's resident gross-out and chief hell-raiser. He saves his best leers for the appropriate times: stuffing his fat face prior to a cafeteria food fight, or precariously balanced on a ladder peering into a room of half-naked sorority girls...
...stoned expression. Karen Allen charms as Katy, the girlfriend of one of the Deltas who thinks the whole gang is incredibly childish, if funny. And Tom Hulce and Stephen Furst as, respectively, the nerdy and corpulent freshmen pledges who first gawk at, then engage in, the wildness of the frat effectively portray the change from immature awkwardness to full-fledged idiocy...