WEIRD WEDNESDAY: King Frat (1979)

If you’ve ever found yourself watching a teen sex comedy from the ’80s and thinking, “This is great, but it really needs more gastrointestinal distress and a much lower production budget,” then boy, do I have a gift for you. King Frat isn’t just a movie; it’s a biological hazard caught on 35mm. It’s the kind of regional filmmaking that feels like it was developed in a bathtub filled with stale beer and regret.

Before he became the founding editor of The Huffington Post, Roy Sekoff starred in this movie, filmed in Miami and Coral Gables, as a takeoff on Animal House. The Bluto Blutarsky of this film is J.J. “Gross-Out” Gumbroski, played by John DiSanti, who, believe it or not, would go on to be in other movies (*batteries not included is one of them).

Set at Yellowstream University, this movie follows the Pi Kappa Delta fraternity, who are only concerned with drinking. A good chunk of the film involves them mooning people, which leads to the death of the dean of the school. Then, a farting contest is announced, and everyone battles to have the best farts in a scene that goes on longer than you’d expect, then goes about another seven minutes past that.

And then there’s the music. Most films have a soundtrack. This is a hostage situation. The same bouncy, synthesized earworm plays throughout the entire runtime, looping with a psychotic persistence that would make a CIA interrogator blush. By the thirty-minute mark, you’ll be humming it. By the end of the film, you’ll hear it when people talk to you, and then you’ll start wondering if the soundtrack has come to life to further torment you.

Amazingly, King Frat comes from Ken Wiederhorn, the same man who directed Shock Waves, Return of the Living Dead Part II and Meatballs II. How do you go from the eerie, waterlogged Nazi zombies to a movie where the primary plot point is a synchronized flatulence symphony? Wiederhorn is a man of many seasons, and apparently, one of those seasons was spent in the absolute gutter. This feels like the moment he decided to see exactly how much the human spirit could endure. It’s filmed in Miami and Coral Gables, but it feels like it was shot in the locker room of a condemned bowling alley.

King Frat is literally the bottom of the absolute barrel of filmmaking, and I love it. If Animal House was too classy for you, if you wondered if they could make a movie where a frat could murder a dean by farting in his face and stealing the body and then have a scene where numerous men and women fart and nearly shit themselves, good news. This is the movie for you.

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