National Lampoon's Animal House

**National Lampoon's Animal House** is a 1978 film starring John Belushi, Tim Matheson, John Vernon, Verna Bloom, Tom Hulce and Donald Sutherland, directed by John Landis, written by Harold Ramis, Douglas Kenney and Chris Miller and produced by Matty Simmons and Ivan Reitman.

The film was a financial success as it generated a profit of $64 million.

## Plot

In 1962, Faber College freshmen Lawrence "Larry" Kroger and Kent Dorfman seek to join a fraternity. Finding themselves out of place at the prestigious Omega Theta Pi house's party, they visit the slovenly Delta Tau Chi house next door, where Kent is a "legacy": he cannot be rejected, because his older brother Fred was a member. John "Bluto" Blutarsky welcomes them, and they meet other Deltas, including motorcyclist Daniel Simpson "D-Day" Day, chapter president Robert Hoover, ladies' man Eric "Otter" Stratton, and Otter's best friend Donald "Boon" Schoenstein, whose girlfriend Katy is constantly pressuring him to stop drinking with the Deltas and do something with his life. Larry and Kent are invited to pledge and given the fraternity names "Pinto" and "Flounder" respectively, by Bluto, Delta's sergeant-at-arms.

College Dean Vernon Wormer wants to remove the Deltas, who are already on probation, due to various campus conduct violations and an abysmal academic standing, so he invokes his emergency authority and places the fraternity on "double-secret probation." He directs the clean-cut, smug Omega president Greg Marmalard to find a way for him to remove the Deltas from campus. Various incidents further increase the dean's and the Omegas' animosity toward the Deltas, including the prank-related accidental death of a horse belonging to Omega member and Reserve Officers' Training Corps cadet commander Douglas C. Neidermeyer and Otter flirting with Marmalard's girlfriend Mandy.

Bluto and D-Day steal the answers to an upcoming test from the trash, not realizing that the Omegas have switched papers for the exam. The Deltas fail the exam, and their grade-point averages fall so low that Wormer tells them he needs only one more incident to revoke their charter. To cheer themselves up, the Deltas organize a toga party and bring in Otis Day and the Knights to provide live music. Wormer's wife Marion attends at Otter's invitation and has sex with him. Pinto hooks up with Clorette, a cashier he meets at the supermarket. They make out, but they do not have sex because she passes out drunk. Pinto takes her home in a shopping cart and learns that she is the mayor's daughter.

Outraged by his wife's escapades and the mayor's threat of personal violence, Wormer organizes a hearing and revokes Delta's charter. To take their minds off their troubles, Otter, Boon, Flounder, and Pinto go on a road trip. Otter picks up four young women from Emily Dickinson College as dates for himself and his Delta brothers by posing as Frank Lymon, the fiancé of a college student who died in a recent kiln explosion. They stop at a roadhouse bar where Otis Day's band is performing, not realizing it has an exclusively African-American clientele. A couple of hulking patrons intimidate the Deltas and they quickly leave, smashing up Flounder's brother's car in their haste and leaving their dates behind.

Marmalard and other Omegas lure Otter to a motel and beat him up after Mandy's best friend Babs tells him that Mandy and Otter are having an affair. The Deltas' midterm grades are so poor that an ecstatic Wormer expels them all, having already notified their local draft boards that they are now eligible for military service. The news shocks Flounder so badly that he vomits on Wormer.

The Deltas are despondent, but Bluto rallies them with an impassioned speech. They decide to get revenge on Wormer, the Omegas, and the college. D-Day converts Flounder's brother Fred's damaged car into an armored vehicle. They hide it inside a cake-shaped breakaway float and sneak into the annual homecoming parade. As they wreak havoc on the event, the futures of several of the student main characters are revealed using freeze-frame labels. Most of the Deltas become respectable professionals (with Bluto marrying Mandy and becoming a senator), while the Omegas and the other adversaries suffer less fortunate outcomes (Neidermeyer, for example, is reported killed by his own troops in Vietnam).