Animal House

This 1978 comedy stars many well known actors in their younger years. The most notable performance is by the late John Belushi. Some of the other better known actors in are Tom Hulce, Kevin Bacon, Karen Allen, and Stephen Furst. Donald Sutherland also appears in the film as an English professor. The story takes place at Faber College in 1962.

The basic story is about the conflict between Dean Vernon Wormer (John Vernon) who is allied with certain members of Omega House, against Delta House, the worst fraternity on campus. It is the Dean’s goal to rid the campus of Delta House.

The story opens during pledge week. Larry Kroger (Hulce) and Kent Dorfman (Furst) are making the rounds of the college fraternities. Their first stop is Omega House where they are quickly ushered into a corner of the room where all the misfits are gathered. It’s obvious that the snobbish, wealthy Omegas want nothing to do with them.

Their next stop is Delta House where they find John “Bluto” Blutarsky (Belushi) urinating in the front yard. He affirms that it is the Delta House and invites them in. There they find rock and roll music loudly blaring as opposed to the soft piano music at the Omega House. Members and guests are drinking, gambling, and generally carrying on with activities that the Omegas would surely look at as perversions.

Kroger and Dorfman are accepted into the Delta fraternity. Dorfman is allowed in only because because he’s a legacy. His brother Fred was a Delta. Kroger is given the Delta Name of Pinto while Dorfman is given the name of Flounder.

Dorfman is in the ROTC where Omega blow hard Doug Neidermeyer (Mark Metcalf) is the commander. Neidermeyer has a strong dislike for Dorfman and shows it by getting off his horse and yelling in Dorfman’s face. He then orders Dorfman to clean the stables every night.

That evening, Dorfman is trying to clean a stall but he’s terrified of Neidermeyer’s horse. Bluto and Daniel Day, or D-Day as he’s better known, show up at the stables with a plan. They take the horse to the administration building and place it in the dean’s office. D-Day pulls out a semi-automatic pistol and tells Dorfman to shoot the horse. Dorfman is hesitant at first but finally agrees, not knowing that the gun is filled with blanks. After re-entering the dean’s office, he points the gun and fires. The horse keels over, dead from an apparent heart attack.

The sinister Omegas, going forward with a plan to get the Deltas thrown out of school, go into the office and substitute the discarded mimeograph sheet of the psychology exam in the waste basket with a sheet containing all the wrong answers. Later, Bluto and D-Day retrieve the sheet from the basement waste bin, thinking they had all the answers to the exam. After the exam, the Deltas find out that they’d flunked it. This is about the same time that they are told by Dean Wormer they’d been on double secret probation since the beginning of the semester.

Since they know they’re going to get thrown out of college anyway, they decide to have a toga party. Attending the party are the barely teenage daughter of the mayor and Dean Wormer’s wife along with the rest of the crowd. Following the toga party, a disciplinary hearing is held by the student court, encouraged by Dean Wormer, where the Delta fraternity is banished from the college.

Dean Wormer eventually gets the results of the psychology exam which he has been anxiously waiting for. He summons the Deltas to his office and expels them from Faber College. They decide to fight back against Wormer and the Omegas during the homecoming parade. What follows is utter chaos but they do get even.

This is a terrific comedy movie all the way through. People who complain about the second half of it being slightly disjointed must not be watching very closely.

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