Director: Daniel Robbins
Writer: Zack Weiner (Screenplay)
Starring: Zachery Byrd, Phillip Andre Botello, Zack Weiner, Aaron Dalla Villa, Cameron Cowperthwaite
Plot: A group of college freshmen pledge an exclusive fraternity but soon realize there’s more at stake than they could have ever imagined.
Tagline – Few get in. None get out.
Runtime: 1 Hour 17 Minutes
There may be spoilers in the rest of the review
Story: Pledge starts when three freshman Justin (Byrd), Ethan (Botello) and David (Weiner) are trying to find a fraternity to become part of, which will see them rejected by all of them. The three end up getting invited to a special exclusive place run by Max (Villa), which seems like a great place for parties.
When the guys return believing they are part of a small hazing process, they find themselves dealing with Max, Ricky (Cowperthwaite) and Bret’s (Pimentel) twisted hazing process, one that will push them to the limits.
Thoughts on Pledge
Thoughts – Pledge brings us the extreme of the hazing culture that could well run through America, we get the generic charcters, the geeky outsiders trying to find a place with the ‘cool’ kids on the compass. This offers very little to anything we have seen from hazing which has gone too far in the past before. Turning it a battle for survival over anything else, with a bigger picture that isn’t remotely hinted at early on. The performances in the film are fine, nobody does much to standout in the film. The film goes for shock value with the extremes it wants to put the kids through, but it seems to hold back from going as far as it could. This does seem to want to go in direction that gets caught up in trying to be edgy and not hitting the heights.
Final Thoughts – Pledge is a horror that wants to be edgy and falls flat on its face with what it is trying to do.