Anthrax were always the most playful of thrash metal's 'big four', so it wasn't a big surprise for me to find that supernatural slasher flick Pledge Night, in which Anthrax singer Joey Belladonna has a blink-and-miss-it cameo, is far from serious. In fact, the first 40 minutes or so comprises almost entirely of juvenile hell week pranks perpetrated on new pledges by the brothers of the Phi-Epsilon fraternity; there's no horror whatsoever! All of this is really quite tedious and not in the least bit amusing, so it's a relief when the blood finally begins to flow, no matter how cheesy it all happens to be.
The fun really starts when Phi-Epsilon brother Dan (Arthur Lundquist) becomes possessed by the spirit of Sid, a fraternity pledge who died twenty years earlier when a hazing prank went horribly wrong. Controlled by the malevolent spirit, Dan kills a bloke sat on the toilet, stabs another in the back with screwdrivers, electrocutes a girl in the bath, rams a food whisk down another's throat, and blows up some poor sap's butt with a cherry bomb. These deaths are relatively gore-free, but the film eventually delivers a few cheap but entertaining splatter effects after Sid emerges from Dan's back, Freddy Krueger style, and goes in search of more victims: we get strangulation with large intestine, an exploding stomach, a 180 degrees head twist, and one victim who is killed by having his head pushed into Sid's gaping stomach wound!
On top of all this incredibly silly horror nonsense, Pledge Night also manages to deliver that other staple of the genre, gratuitous female nudity, serving up a grand total of six pairs of breasts, and a metal thrashing mad soundtrack courtesy of
you guessed it
Anthrax!
3/10 for the woeful hazing antics of the first half; 6/10 for the second, horror-packed half. That's an average of 4.5/10, rounded up to 5 for IMDb.
