Total Frat Movie (2016)

(On Cable TV, December 2018) I thought they didn’t make movies like this anymore. Feeling like the 1980s sent a time capsule to the 2010s, Total Frat Movie is a college sex comedy along the lines of, well, the 1980s college sex comedies featuring fraternities, copious female nudity and dubiously gross humour. The loose outlines of the plot have something about a frat going through the process of getting its charter reinstated three years after excessive partying. I’m told that the film comes from a web site of some sort, but don’t quote me on that—I’m so out of the loop on college fraternities (which generally don’t exist in any significant capacity in Canada) that I’m not even sure where the loop is. Total Frat Movie never has any illusion about its audience: it’s clearly made for white college-age boys who enjoy the party lifestyle. If you’re looking for questioning the idea of fraternities, racial diversity, sexual equality or any kind of progressive value beyond binge drinking, this is not the movie for you. Even by the notoriously Caucasian standards of mainstream American cinema, the film features a remarkable lack of diversity in its casting. It also has some seriously reprehensible moments in glossing over male rape. And it’s really not clever, witty or even all that funny. Still, there are a few upsides: There’s some basic filmmaking competency to the effort despite the visibly low budget—director Warren P. Sonoda handles the party sequences quite well. Tom Green is actually quite funny in hamming it up as the college dean. And I have to confess that I will never, ever really complain about wall-to-wall gratuitous coed nudity. Despite being in almost constant and acute disagreement with just about everything the film intends to do, I must have laughed a few times along the way. The evidence piles up: I probably have to consider Total Frat Movie as a guilty pleasure of some sort. (Surprisingly enough, the film doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page as of this writing. Maybe I’ll add one eventually.)