Three buddies are trawling their college’s fraternity parties, trying to find a frat they can fit in with and join. They are rejected multiple times, mostly because of the way they look and their nerdy carriage. They do run across a very hot coed who invites them to a mucho secret frat party out at a mansion in the middle of nowhere. The boys go, and despite a little bit of weirdness, are fully accepted by all the partying babes and the studly dudes who are there. Invited back the next day to pledge, they have little clue that their lives are about to be forever altered, because this frat may not be a fraternity at all, but instead perhaps a recruiting ground for a secret society. And thus their brutal hazing begins with being branded and then much, much worse to come. Will they survive this rite of passage, or will they fail and…disappear?
This is one of those many smaller horror flicks that come out each year and fly under the radar with little mention. It’s a good one, though, with plenty of entertaining moments and scary situations. It’s not the kind of movie with a lot of jump scares and I’d say it compares more favorably in tone to films like The Purge series. These guys are in a bad situation that keeps getting worse and worse, not matter what they do to get out. The twist in the tale is pretty good and comes at about the right time, just when things are starting to get a tad bit stale. The biggest negative criticism I have of it is that at times it strains credulity; but really, you can say that’s true about any horror film. I wondered why the guys didn’t just bail, why they put up with the initial rounds of abuse and didn’t simply walk away. It became clearer as the story carried on that this wasn’t an option for the characters, although they didn’t know it yet, nor did we as the audience. Still, there were moments when I wanted them to stop sniveling and start fighting.
Pledge is a fun movie, with lots of uneasy moments and twisted games that will keep you watching and on the edge of your seat for most of the running time. It is a terrifying trip into a twilight zone world of hazing gone not only wrong, but absolutely wicked. The characters are funny and engaging and you really do care what happens to them, so this carries a lot of the emotional weight of the film. If you want a good distraction for an hour and a half, you could do much worse.
★★✮☆