(1 / 5)
A group of college freshmen pledge an exclusive fraternity but soon realize there’s more at stake than they could have ever imagined.
Though little horror flicks like “Pledge” aren’t necessarily meant to induce deeply existential rumination, this particular case makes me wonder. I’m not quite sure whether director Daniel Robbins’ intentions were to satirize the whole fraternity pledging process – which is so ripe for satire it’s almost not even worth it – or if he simply meant to tell a straightforward story of a bunch of geeks getting massacred, a “Revenge of the Nerds” meets “Hostel” mash-up, albeit without the humor of the former or the dread of the latter. As it stands, “Pledge” doesn’t quite work as a midnight-movie delight, nor does it impress or make you chuckle. It simply sits there, as pointless and vile as the process it depicts.
The plot in a nutshell: a threesome of nerds desperately try to get into a fraternity, willing to go to extremes just to be accepted – until they are led to a hidden mansion by a beautiful girl with the promise of parties and endless sex. What they – and by extension we, the audience – get instead is a series of grueling ordeals, forced upon them by a bunch of pseudo-jocks, that range from being branded to drinking rat-shakes to having heads sawed off with a kitchen knife. The finale takes a lame (literal) stab at some sort of depth – or perhaps it’s all an elaborate joke – but regardless, it left me cold and evaporated from my mind minutes after.
“Pledge” is just another torture-porn flick with inconsequential events and characters sputtering cheesy one-liners in-between getting ridiculed, harassed and physically abused. A nihilistic exercise in senseless violence, if “Pledge” serves one purpose, it’s a reminder of the degrading, identity-stripping nature of the pledging process – and a youth spent in a frat or a sorority – and makes one wonder how it all adds up to form the foundation of this great country we live in.
Opens in theaters and on VOD January 11th
