That was Eric Stratton and he was damn glad to meet you... (National Lampoon's Animal House (DVD))

Member Name: salgirl

Product:	National Lampoon's Animal House (DVD)
Date:	30/06/01 (116 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: funny, funny, funny

Disadvantages: they don't exist

Americans often seem to worry about not having a culture. Sure they do, and this film proves it.

Imagine the worst collection of chauvanistic, brain-dead morons attending the same college as neo-nazi, upper-class-up-their-backsides, superhuman specimens and you have the film that is Animal House.

The battle of the frat houses is the setting of this once-anarchic film, pitching the immortal good guys versus the bad guys scenarios, except that the bad guys are the good guys, and the good guys are the bad guys in this anti-version of American pie-ness.

Set further back in the sixties, this film carried on the tradition of slightly off the wall viewing, a la Kentucky Fried Movie, and mixes up a little bit of everything in order to come up with comedy that still smells fresh and sweet.

John Belushi, Tim Matheson and Peter Reigert lead the bad/good guys of Delta House through mayhem and lots of girls in their quest to live their college lives their way. Against the Dean's wishes, of course, and so would the seduction of his wife by Eric Stratton (Tim Matheson), the charming, glib tongued, horney little devil himself, if he but knew it.

Larry Kroger (Tom Hulce) and Kent Dorfman (Stephen Furst) are two new pledges who are inducted into the Delta Frat House, and are taken under the protective wing of the top dudes, being driven on Road Trips out to Black Only juke joints and setting up their friends with girls by pretending that Stratton is a recently deceased college girl's fiance.

Nicely balanced humour from the women in the film, the biggest nod about which goes to Karen Allen, means that there is no way you should come away from this film offended by any of the content. Including what happens to the horse. Or Bluto's (Belushi) behaviour on the ladder outside the girls dorm.

It's puerile. It's laddish before Laddism was officially christened. 'Men Behaving Badly' pales into insignif
icance. This is the stuff of adolescent dreaming, including the glimpse of the naked bottom of Donald Sutherland. Well, my dreams anyway. Yes, I know he's odd looking, but he's sexy with it. Except he does have a perm in this film, but that's okay because his bottom hasn't.

I had no idea what National Lampoon was all about when this film first surfaced. I soon learned.

Waaaaaaaay superior to anything else that came after this, including the actual follow-ups, this is an excellent film to slob to, laugh with and wish that your life at the local techie college had been just a nth degree as interesting as this.

Summary: