Animal House

1 9 7 8 (USA)

Rude and crude, rough and ready, sometimes revolting but essentially innocent in a raunchy undergraduate kind of way - This was the original frat house comedy - a riot of raunchy silliness set in a small college in 1962, with the film following the bawdy style of the famed humour magazine, National Lampoon.

Animal House told no discernible story, but concentrated on the behaviour of the repulsive Delta House frat brothers (led by the gross but brilliant John Belushi) as they battled the suave and elite Omega House and the college Dean.

The inhabitants of Delta House took great delight in crushing beer cans against their craniums, indulging in grossness of every conceivable kind and bursting into song a lot. Not to mention shocking the campus elite.

The anarchic and exuberant screenplay was by Harold Ramis, Douglas Kenney and Chris Miller, and the cast under John Landis' uninhibited direction included Kevin Bacon, John Vernon, Bruce McGill, Thomas Hulce, Tim Matheson, Stephen Furst, Mark Metcalf, Mary Louise Weller, Martha Smith, Karen Allen and Donald Sutherland as a hip, pot-smoking English professor.