It’s same old song and dance.  In the 60s, a hippie named Sid (Joey Belladonna) is accidentally killed during a hazing gone wrong.  In the 90s, during another fraternity hazing, Sid (now played by Will Kempe, who, the same year that Pledge Night was released, played Rick Von Slonecker in Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan, a film that about as different from Pledge Night as a apple is from a banana) emerges from a toilet and kills everyone almost everyone at the frat house.  His name is now Acid Sid now and he has more one-liners than Freddy Krueger.  “That’s for Spiro Agnew!” he says as he dispatches one victim who probably didn’t even know who Spiro Agnew was.  Other deaths include death by castration, an egg beater, and, of course, a radio dropped in a bath tub.  Pledge Night is interesting in that it does occasionally have a sense of humor about itself.  It starts out as a frat comedy and there is actually more time spent on the absurdity of pledges being hazed than on them being killed.  Once Sid does arrive, it becomes your standard Nightmare on Elm Street rip-off, albeit one where the majority of the victims are male jocks instead of the usual victims who show up in slasher films.  Most of the frat boys are fairly obnoxious so you’ll be on Sid’s side the entire time.  The film certainly is.

If Pledge Night gets any attention today, it is probably because of a mix of Metropolitan fans who want to see Rick Von Slonecker kill frat bros and Anthrax fans who have heard that Joey Belladonna is in the movie.  Belladonna is only in the movie for a few minutes, just long enough to get submerged in acid as a part of absurdly cruel fraternity prank.  Anthrax also provided the film’s forgettable soundtrack.

Pledge Night is a typical 90s college slasher, clearly influenced more by Nightmare on Elm Street than Friday the 13th.  If the movie had been made a few years later, it could have taken full advantage of the self-referential style of horror that was introduced to the slasher genre by Scream and Pledge Night probably would have been a better movie.  Pledge Night does have a sense of humor about itself and the slasher genre but it often seems to be held back by the requirements of also trying to satisfy what horror fans were expecting to get in 1990.  By trying to toe the line between horror and comedy, Pledge Night is never scary enough to work as horror or funny enough to work as comedy.