FRAT STAR
US, 2017, 85 minutes, Colour.
Connor Lawrence, Justin Mark, Cathryn Dylan Ortiz, Chris Elliott, Tyler Weaks.
Directed by Grant S. Johnson, Jena Serbu.
A brief film about college fraternities, pledges, hazing…
There is quite a deal of detail of the hazing which means that this film seems to have its cake and eat it at the same time, displaying in detail the bad behaviour and attitudes while doing an expose of them.
The central character is a nerdish young man who gets a scholarship to college, has been in a relationship but is rather timid except in texting his former girlfriend and her new boyfriend. His father is the bluff type, considering himself as one of the boys when at college.
There is a strange phenomenon at the beginning of the film where Nick, the central character, sitting on steps sees a ghostly alternate version of himself appearing. This version will appear during the film as Nick is transformed.
Nick is reluctant at first, especially with his brash roommate, Billy (Justin Mark) who makes every effort to persuade him to join in the initiation. Gradually, Nick’s resistance is overcome and he enters wholeheartedly into the basically stupid and humiliating behaviour demanded by the college aristocratic leaders.
There is also a young woman who is in the sorority and is the target of her becoming a member – which she initially resists but is entangled then with her emotions for Nick.
The ending is fatal for Nick, not resisting the overtures from the elitist leaders but entering more and more wholeheartedly into the experiences – but ultimately rejected.
Roger Moore writes in Movie Nation
Regarding the college sex comedy “Frat Star,” it doesn’t really let co-directors Grant Johnson and Ippsie Jones off the hook by saying “They MEANT” to make something appalling.
They succeeded, exposing the elitist, sexist and degrading “Greek” system as it ruins a perfectly good kid with callousness, sexist humiliations, class snobbery, racist indoctrination and sexual privilege in the most explicit sense.
But it’s a “light” comedy, one that tries to have it both ways, suggesting our hero/victim was already a victim before he got there — that his “initiation” into “manhood” is both necessary and funny. Because Nick Cooper is nothing if not a “pussy,” a financially-aided Ivy League kid who thinks hard work and true love are how one finds success and happiness.
But this grating farce makes its satiric points so clumsily, pounds its punchlines so relentlessly and vulgarly that it only made it to Netflix for the titillation factor. Teenage boys can watch college boys having lots of sex, much of it degrading, with compliant, half-nude coeds.
