National Lampoon's Animal House (John Landis, 1978)

This started off promisingly and would've remained a knockout if Landis had maintained a Gigi-like alternation between the snobs and the slobs. Instead, he piles up set pieces, many of which requiring complete inebriation to find them funny. There had to be a better way to introduce boobs than the scene in which John Belushi slams a ladder against the window of a sorority house to peek in on a topless pillow fight, the comic payoff being that he...wait for it...falls backward onto the lawn. That's comedy genius? The entire dead girlfriend/black roadhouse sequence could've been snipped. So could every scene with Donald Sutherland. Why on earth introduce a nanosecond of "seriousness" into a grossout comedy by having Karen Allen cheat on Peter Riegert with Sutherland and then, even worse, do nothing with it? By the time of the climactic parade desecration, I longed to return to the beginning, marveling over Tim Matheson's butt.

By contrast, I Wanna Hold Your Hand from the same damn year is more raucous, more violent, with a throughline that contextualizes each cartoonish set piece. And yet it flopped miserably whereas Animal House grossed $141 million on a $3 million budget according to Wiki. Why? My guess is that I Wanna Hold Your Hand was driven by female energy and, apart from Grease, that was apparently box-office poison in the 1970s (and beyond?). I hate the world today.

Grade: B-minus and falling