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.
Animal House was a riot of raunchy silliness set in a small college in 1962, with the film following the bawdy style of the famed college humour magazine, National Lampoon.
Incoming freshmen Larry “Pinto” Kroger (Tom Hulce) and Kent “Flounder” Dorfman (Stephen Furst) find themselves rejected by the pretentious Omega fraternity, and instead pledge to Delta House.
The Deltas are a motley fraternity of rejects including Otter (Tim Matheson), Hoover (James Widdoes), D-Day (Bruce McGill), Boon (Peter Riegert), and pledge master John “Bluto” Blutarsky (John Belushi).
Dean Wormer (John Vernon) decides that this is the year he’s going to get the Deltas expelled and their chapter decertified so places the fraternity on “double secret probation” and, with help from Omega president Greg Marmalard (James Daughton) and hard-nosed member Doug Neidermeyer (Mark Metcalf), starts looking for any pretext on which to bring the members of the Delta fraternity up on charges.
The film told no discernible story but concentrated on the behaviour of the repulsive Delta House frat brothers as they battled the suave and elite Omega House and the Dean of Faber College.
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, Thomas Hulce, Stephen Furst, Mary Louise Weller, Martha Smith, Karen Allen and Donald Sutherland as a hip, pot-smoking English professor.
Time was tight for location shooting as the University of Oregon rationed the crew to one month for the entire shoot.
John “Bluto” Blutarsky
John Belushi
Eric “Otter” Stratton
Tim Matheson
Dean Vernon Wormer
John Vernon
Marion Wormer
Verna Bloom
Larry “Pinto” Kroger
Tom Hulce
Mayor Carmine DePasto
Cesare Danova
Donald “Boon” Schoenstein
Peter Riegert
Kent “Flounder” Dorfman
Stephen Furst
Katy
Karen Allen
Professor Dave Jennings
Donald Sutherland
Daniel “D-Day” Simpson
Bruce McGill
Mandy Pepperidge
Mary Louise Weller
Gregg Marmalard
James Daughton
Chip Diller
Kevin Bacon
Clorette DePasto
Sarah Holcomb
Director
John Landis
