National Lampoon's Animal House
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: John Belushi, John Vernon, Tim Matheson, Tom Hulce, Verna BloomDVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 109 minutes
DVD Release Date: 1998-10-14
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Universal Studios
Movie Reviews of National Lampoon's Animal House
Movie Review: "TOGA! TOGA! TOGA!"
Summary: 5 Stars
It's the undisputed heavyweight champ of frat-boy movies. Many erstwhile pretenders to the throne have come and gone (Porky's, Screwballs, Revenge of the Nerds to name but a few) but none of them have come close to matching this slice of genius from John Landis. Even today, many years after it first came out, Animal House still stands head and shoulders above the competition. Like its undoubted star - the late John Belushi, Animal House is loud, stupid, vulgar and more often than not: uproariously funny. As well as its influence on those who shamelessly copied the formula for their own efforts; the film's larger-than-life celebration of youthful excess also spawned a craze for drunken toga parties and food-fights in college campuses across America.
Set in the early 1960s at the fictional Faber College, the film deals with the story of the debauched Delta Fraternity: a collection of drunken headcases, misfits and screw-ups for whom higher education is just something that gets in the way of partying and screwing girls.
The plot itself is so simple a retarded five-year-old could follow it without much trouble. The big end of year parade is coming and the Dean doesn't want the Deltas to screw it up and embarrass him in front of the Mayor - so he sets out to get them thrown off campus by putting the Deltas on the mysterious `double-secret probation'.
To achieve his goal, Wormer enlists the help of the smarmy Omega fraternity. The Omegas are the antithesis of all that the fun lovin' Deltas cherish and hold dear to their drunken hearts. Headed by the sexually inadequate Greg Marmalard (`Shouldn't something be happening by now, Greg Honey?') and aided and abetted by sadistic General Patton wannabe, Doug Neidermeyer and the slimy Chip Diller, who joins the Omegas after a dodgy homoerotic initiation ceremony (an early appearance from Kevin Bacon). The Omegas are a classic collection of odious rich kids just begging to be taken down a peg or two.
Predictably all this attention does is make the Deltas rise to new heights of depravity; shoplifting; shagging the Dean's wife (and the Mayor's daughter); and generally getting pissed-up and singing "Louie Louie" every five-minutes. By the end of the film, stupidity has ultimately triumphed over stuffy officialdom. The Deltas are reinstated and the Dean has been put firmly back in his place - but you don't really care about all that: being just an excuse to revel in the mindless carry-on perpetrated by the Deltas.
Chief architect of mayhem is the gleefully moronic "Bluto" Blutarsky (Belushi), a foul-mouthed drunken slob who leaves a trail of destruction in his considerable wake and is aided and abetted at every turn by his unhinged side-kick D-Day. His role is pretty much encapsulated in his first scene in the film as he sways drunkenly, belches and carelessly pisses all over the shoes of naive newcomers, Larry Kroger and Kent Dorfmann. However, perhaps Bluto's crowning moment is the rabble-rousing speech given to his fraternity brothers after they are finally bombed out of Faber. `Over? Did you say over? Nothing is over until we decide it is. Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbour - Hell no!' he rants in idiot fury. `...This could be the greatest night of our lives'.
Director John Landis makes no pretence of trying to create some kind of art-house flick for the culture set, or some cloying morality tale for middle America. Instead, the comedy in Animal House is painted in primary-colours and using only the broadest of brush-strokes. The film frequently crosses into bad taste territory in search of more puerile laughs. (The Mayor's daughter is only 13, for instance. Then there's campus stud, Otter pretending to be a dead girl's fiancee in order to score with her room-mate; or the trip to an all black roadhouse). There's also a typically odd-ball cameo appearance from evergreen movie-weirdo Donald Southerland as Jennings, the spliff-smoking English Professor who hates the stuff he teaches as much as the students do.
Put quite simply, Animal House is a modern American classic. It's not John Landis's best film: American Werewolf In London and perennial student favourite The Blues Brothers were still to come, but it's a thousand times better than some of the travesties he has produced in more recent years.
As Dean Wormer points out; `Fat drunk and stupid is no way to go through life son'. Watching Animal House, I'll be damned if it doesn't look like a lot of fun.
Landis is very fond of putting little in-gags into all of his movies. Perhaps his most well known is the way he manages to slip the phrase `See you next Wednesday' into virtually every flick (originally the title of a student film: it crops up as the name of the porno movie in American Werewolf, on a giant billboard in the Blues Brothers, and in Jamie Lee Curtis' apartment in Trading Places). Animal House is no exception to this - at the end of the film, Landis uses a series of freeze frames to tell what happens to the characters. Southern Belle, Babs it turns out, becomes a tour guide at Universal Studios. Lo and behold, at the end of the credits there's a plug for the tour with the message: `Just ask for Babs.' We're also informed that the psychopathic Niedermeyer is killed by his own troops in Vietnam. In the Landis directed segment of Twighlight Zone: The Movie, one of the soldiers complains that they should never have killed Lt. Niedermeyer. Sneaky.
Summary of National Lampoon's Animal House
This is one of those movies that works for all the wrong reasons--disgusting, lowbrow, base humor that we are all far too sophisticated to find amusing. So, just don't tell anyone you still think it's a riot to watch John Belushi as the brutish Bluto slurp Jell-O or terrorize his less-aggressive fellow students. This crude parody of college life in the '60s spawned many imitations, but none could match the fresh-faced talent or bad taste of this huge box office success. (Remember all those toga parties in the '80s?) The first of the National Lampoon movies, this was originally released as National Lampoon's Animal House. Keep an eye out for a very young Kevin Bacon in his first credited screen appearance. --Rochelle O'GormanSimilar DVD Movies
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