King Frat (1979)

A shameless rip-off of Animal House (1978) that outdoes the previous movie’s gross-out factor while giving only lip service to the antiestablishment attitude that gave Animal House its small measure of credibility, King Frat bludgeons viewers with 85 hyperactive minutes of scatological stupidity. Consider the atrocities of the opening-credits sequence. As the slobs of Pi Kappa Delta drive around in the fraternity’s official car—a hearse, natrually—the boys drink beer and moon everyone they encounter, culminating in the tender moment when J.J. “Gross-Out” Gumbroski (John DiSanti) breaks wind while mooning the nearby college president, who then drops dead of a heart attack. Instead of expressing concern for the fatality they just caused, the lads return to their frat house, thus completing the morning beer run. And so it goes from there. One of the Deltas is a Native American named Chief Latrine (Dan Chandler), of the Kissawang tribe. Yes, kiss-a-wang. Previous generations of Kissawangs helped name the school Yellowstream University, as Chief Latrine explains: “My ancestors pissed in the white man’s water for 50 years. White man never knew. Fucking dummies!” Can it get worse? Oh, yes, it can get worse. The centerpiece of the film is an epic farting contest from which “Gross-Out” is disqualified for the infraction of defecating in his pants while attempting to expel gas. There’s a running gag about a rival fraternity’s obsession with massive phalluses. A long scene features “Gross-Out” teaching a new frat brother how to induce vomiting, and “Gross-Out” demonstrates his technique by puking onto the active grill of a Chinese restaurant, where the cooks serve the frat boy’s regurgitated food to customers. There’s also a long sequence during which a dude wearing a gorilla suit is rushed to an emergency room because his persistent erection makes the young woman straddling him unable to detach herself. Even though cinematic history has proven there’s an audience for vulgar comedy, the makers of King Frat provide vulgarity without actual comedy. The kicker is that King Frat is filmed competently and that the storyline is clear (albeit outrageously derivative), so King Frat looks somewhat like a real movie even though the smell test reveals the truth.

King Frat: LAME