Sunday, January 25, 2015

"Hell Week"

Tagline – “It’s going to be torture”

“25 words or less” – An awkward fraternity pledge comes back from the dead to seek revenge against the brothers who were responsible for his death during a hazing ritual

Full Summary:
It’s another Fall semester at Rockefeller University in Virginia which means a new pledge class of bright-eyed, impressionable freshmen being initiated into the popular Zeta Beta Alpha fraternity.  We open during hell week and the pledges are being forced to drink copious amounts of beer until they puke by the strict, overbearing pledge master, Chad, and his fellow fraternity brothers.

Every pledge class has that one awkward kid that doesn’t quite fit in and is the whipping boy for the upperclassmen and this year is no different.  That whipping boy this time is Jasper, a skinny, frail, boyish-looking freshmen who is pledging the fraternity because of his desire to be accepted by someone, anyone.  Jasper’s asked to stay behind by Chad after the rest of the class has been dismissed following the drinking competition.  That’s when the fraternity brothers force him to drink his own vomit.  This is just one more incidence of hazing in a semester filled with them.

The pledge class “hell week” culminates with Zeta’s legendary “Wooly Mammoth” party, named after their infamous jungle juice, but of course Jasper and his fellow pledge brothers have to be on duty while the upperclassmen have fun.  Jasper is specifically assigned the most menial tasks like cleaning the kitchen and mopping up the bathroom and is forced to watch while everyone else rages around him.  There’s a slight glimmer of hope when he starts chatting up a fellow freshman girl but it’s quickly dashed when Chad swoops in and steals her away from him.

Later in the night after the party has died down, several of the fraternity brothers decide to cure their boredom by hazing the pledges so they gather up the class and bring them to the lake on campus.  There, in the middle of the night, the brothers led by Chad and Zach, the fraternity president, demand that the pledges strip down to their underwear and swim to a fountain located in the middle of the lake.  Jasper protests claiming that he’s not a good swimmer and doesn’t want to do the task.

Instead of compassion, his protests are met with ridicule as the brothers strip him totally naked, to the laughter of the gathered crowd, and kick him into the lake.  The pledges - drunk, tired and disoriented - swim to the fountain and back, as the crowd continues to drink and mock them.  However one pledge never makes it back.  After a couple brothers jump into the lake to frantically look for this missing pledge they realize that Jasper has drowned.

The fraternity leadership is faced with a choice – either report Jasper’s drowning and risk an investigation that could see the fraternity kicked off of campus and the brothers arrested or they could bury the body and pretend like nothing happened.  After a short debate, the fraternity president decides to send a few brothers to bury Jasper’s body at a park miles away from campus.

Fast forward one year later and it’s another Fall semester at Rockefeller University with another new pledge class for Zeta Beta Alpha.  Jasper, still officially missing, is just a distant memory, if a memory at all, to most on campus.  While many have forgotten about Jasper, he is determined not to forget about the fraternity that killed him even in death as he comes back from beyond the grave to terrorize his former brothers during hell week.

At first Jasper’s ghost engages in harmless menacing of the fraternity brothers – staring them down in the library, chasing them throughout campus – but his actions quickly escalate to more harmful practices such as throwing knives which barely miss his targets.  Things culminate at the “Wooly Mammoth” party where Jasper thinks of new and inventive ways to torture people as payback to the fraternity brothers and their girlfriends who ridiculed him throughout his pledging.    

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