 Animal House's longevity has less to do with beer-swilling idiocy or horndog hi-jinks, and more to do with its innate oddness. The film endures because its darkest, most iniquitous instincts make for a more memorable film than some disposable stroke film like '77's The Van or '78's Malibu Beach. Letting the Eldritch Seep: Animal House By: Bob Freville Welcome to Letting the Eldritch Seep, a column in which we will disinter and dissect artistic artifacts of popular culture (film, literature, music) that reek of the arcane, the abominable or the downright weird. These are the works of outsider art that managed beyond reason or probability to be produced inside the machine. Think of the pop song that is catchy as fuck but, also, weird beyond words, or the comedy classic that makes you sick with laughter and unusually queasy. Letting the Eldritch Seep is a celebration of those rare occasions where the pall of horror and the outlandishness of the weird manage to slip past security. This is where the dread infects the catchy chorus and the clown blanc wears a sick grin. Consider it a reminder of those times when Hollywood let the wrong ones in and we got the right stuff as a result. Animal House is a title immediately recognizable to moviegoers throughout the world... even if they have never seen it. It is a title so embedded in pop culture that it has become part of our lexicon. Odds are better than good that you could walk up to a hip 21-year-old in any major city in the Western world and name-drop the flick, and they would have some fundamental notion of what it's about. This 1978 film is credited with creating the Frat comedy, which it did to a staggering level of financial success, grossing an all-time theatrical box office of $141,600,000 against a meager $3 million budget. But more impressive than its earnings, Animal House managed to make the darkness of young adulthood and the venial sins of the patriarchy palatable for a comedy-loving audience. Every time a critic says some new movie is like a modern-day Animal House, I experience a wave of excitement, which is swiftly followed by mild irritation and, finally, inevitable disappointment. Some of us can watch a Greek letter comedy like National Lampoon's Van Wilder or the Sorority romp The House Bunny and appreciate it on its own terms as fairly innocuous, if borderline thoughtless, entertainment. But such films will never come close to Animal House in terms of reach or ambition. Despite what some Redbubble Bluto T-shirt or Imgflip meme might have you believe, Animal House had a lot on its mind. And horror was always in the forefront. The landmark film was the brainchild of National Lampoon co-founder Douglas “Doug” Kenney, a Harvard-educated wingnut who'd begun to be courted by Hollywood after his counterculture humor magazine became a famous breeding ground for raw comic talent. The Lampoon counted Anne Beatts (The Elvira Show, Murphy Brown), Gilda Radner (Gilda Live, Haunted Honeymoon), Joe Orlando (Mad Magazine, DC Comics) John Belushi (Saturday Night Live, The Blues Brothers), John Hughes (National Lampoon's Vacation, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off), and New York Times Best Selling Author P.J. O' Rourke (Give War a Chance, Holidays in Hell) among its contributors. When SNL turned many of these contributors into visible stars, Tinseltown came calling, and the maestro was right behind them. Kenney's aspirations included doing prodigious amounts of cocaine and making motion pictures. And he wasn't the only one. Members of the Lampoon's Radio Hour and stage show set about adapting the magazine's landmark high school yearbook parody for the screen, but this did not pass muster with the studios. For perhaps the first and last time in Hollywood history, movie execs thought it would be sexier if the film featured college-aged characters instead of high school kids. Animal House was never going to be your average teen sex comedy of the period. Kenney's co-authors, Harold Ramis (Analyze This, Groundhog Day, Multiplicity), John Landis (An American Werewolf in London, The Blues Brothers), and Chris Miller (Club Paradise, Multiplicity), were always going for something unhinged and decidedly unHollywood. Which must have made the prospect of spending Hollywood's money that much more amusing. From the outset, Animal House was something more than your average throwaway comedy. Its fledgling screenwriters were invited to pitch Universal Pictures in the form of a film treatment, a summary plot outline that generally runs anywhere from 1-15 pages in length. Instead, Kenney and company crafted a 110-page story that would need to be transformed into a proper screenplay. Those with only a hazy recollection of Animal House may remember it most for its cafeteria food fighting, casual groping, drunken revelry, or pre-American Pie MILF fixation (Otter worms Dean Wormer's wife), but if you cast your mind back through the mire of age, you'll find a darkness to this comedy that existed long before dark comedies were really a thing. Consider the now-iconic image of a Toga-clad Bluto Blutarsky (John Belushi) smashing a hipster's guitar into splinters before blithely apologizing. This clip may not seem like much in the age of Internet pranks and Logan Paul publicity stunts, but at the time it was a shocking moment and one that inspired fits of nervous laughter. Like much of Belushi's on-screen work, this sequence is driven by a fierce, raw energy that exists somewhere out there on the border of mania and fear. To watch this scene now is to study Belushi's stubbly, bushy-browed face and big brown eyes, carefully scanning it for signs of humanity... only to find a sort of doped-out sociopathy at play. Perhaps this sequence, more than any of the countless date rape jokes strewn throughout college comedies of the time (and since) shows us how dangerously bored and desensitized teenagers have become. Then again, maybe Bluto is just in shock from other events. Chaos seems to follow at the heels of the Delta House boys (or maybe it's the other way around). Case in point: the plot to kill Niedermyer's horse. Typically, horror publishers refuse to touch any novel of the macabre that relishes in animal cruelty. But in 1978, a studio comedy made an extended sight gag out of preparing a prized horse for the proverbial glue factory. There is a demonic sense of humor at work all throughout this bizarre film, one that creeps through virtually every frame. It isn't something necessarily discernible to those who aren't looking for it, but it is very obviously intentional on the part of its authors, university alums who recognized the preternatural rituals of college life. If you've seen the film, you know; it lives in the dim recesses of your brain—a flame-lit, shadow-shrouded shot of Kevin Bacon getting ruthlessly spanked by two paddle-wielding Frat elders in creepy cloaks, the ominous organ music rising up as if plucked from a Poverty Row zombie flick, and the Eyes Wide Shut-worthy chant of “Thank you, sir. May I have another!” Another sequence features dialogue that wouldn't be out of place on the sleeve of a low-budget video nasty. Every Halloween, the trees are filled with underwear. Every spring, the toilets explode. And if Animal House hadn't become the mainstream hit that it did, it's easy to imagine it getting a second life on the grindhouse circuit. How could it not with lines like “a 'Roman Toga Party' was held from which we have received more than two dozen reports of individual acts of perversion so profound and disgusting that decorum prohibits listing them here.” This is to say nothing of the black-and-red Deathmobile or the aptly-named “D-Day” (My Cousin Vinny's Bruce McGill) driving !up! a flight of stairs before playing the William Tell Overture on his Adam's apple, or the menacing leer of Dean Wormer as he declares “double secret probation.” This is weird comedy long before Tim & Eric created a niche out of it, and it is wicked in its wicked humor in a way rarely glimpsed in the annals of American humor. Picture the scene where Pinto (Tom Hulce), Schoenstein (Peter Riegert), and Katy (Karen Allen) visit Professor Dave's digs. This enigmatic authority figure apparently lives somewhere on campus, a move that would surely be unacceptable or, at least, frowned upon today. As his name, face, and temperament would have you assume, Dave is a creep. The scene in question finds the young Pinto and friends asking Professor Dave about pot, which leads the crusty creeper to lower his blinds, dim the lights, and lock his door before grinning maniacally at the innocent Pinto. From here, we dissolve to a candlelit tableau of the teacher sharing a joint with the kids and advising Pinto on how to inhale (and not drool so much). Professor Dave doesn't look so much stoned as annoyed while watching Schoenstein singing a love duet with Katy, but his face registers slobbering bleary-eyed lasciviousness when Pinto talks to him about the nature of atomic particles and the solar system. The scene is funny for any number of reasons, but it is especially funny because of the inherent anachronism of the guy playing Professor Dave. Who thought it made perfect sense to cast Donald Sutherland, the guy from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in a movie about college kids cutting loose in the 1960s? Whomever it was, they deserve a big sloppy kiss... or a nice slobbering, bleary-eyed stare. Like a horror film, Animal House plays off the unfamiliar, uncanny, unexpected, and taboo. Animal House's longevity has less to do with beer-swilling idiocy or horndog hi-jinks, and more to do with its innate oddness. The film endures because its darkest, most iniquitous instincts make for a more memorable film than some disposable stroke film like '77's The Van or '78's Malibu Beach. The hilarity is rough-hewn and the hijinks are potentially traumatizing. It's a mainstream movie that manages to feel genuinely dangerous, which was a rare act in '78 and an even rarer one in 2023. Bob Freville Bob Freville is the author of Drive-Thru (Solivagant), The Network People (Psychedelic Horror Press), The Proud and the Dumb (Godless) and The Filthy Marauders (The Evil Cookie Publishing). He is the director of the Berkeley TV favorite Of Bitches & Hounds, and the Troma movie Hemo. He is writing and producing the forthcoming Norwegian drug comedy The Scavengers of Stavanger. Follow his descent into madness at: https://moderncustodian.substack and @bobfreville check out today's horror book review below the heart and soul of horror promotion websites
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
April 2023
|
RSS Feed
|
|