When the writing team at National Lampoon were first approached to make a movie starring Paris Hilton, they were clearly aware of her acting limitations and so wrote the character of Victoria English to be, well, her.

The result is Pledge This!, the annoyingly-punctuated comedy movie that IMDB readers have voted the 11th worst movie EVER.  Worse than The Tony Blair Witch Project and Fat Slags.  We’re going in.  We should note that while the film is narrated by Victoria English, Paris had clearly had enough by this point, and they got a voice double in.

Victoria English is the sorority princess at her college, and is a bit of a bitch.  She slates her friends for having the wrong nail colour, wearing shoes that she’d seen on sale and, critically, not being blonde.  She also boasts about being so thin that she doesn’t have a shadow.   There’s genuine uncertainty as to whether the film is saying “boo, hiss” to this shallow lifestyle, as it seems to be a stretch of self-awareness too far for Hilton.

Victoria, she has a dream.  A dream!  She wants to be on the cover of what they repeatedly and erroneously call “FHM Magazine”, but we’ll call FHM.  To achieve this dream, she needs to win a sorority competition (in which, conveniently, they’ve reached the top five before the movie starts.)  To win the competition, she needs “diversity”, which means getting people who aren’t five foot six, Holocaust-thin with faces painted like a graffitied wall to join her sorority.

The “freaks” are shown independently arriving at college, and they’re as two-dimensional as Paris wishes she was.  There’s the Old One, a woman with fake boobies who wants to screw as many men as possible to get back at her husband’s affair.  The Black One, who talks a bit ghetto.  The Mexican One, who, er, talks a bit Hispanic.  The Fat One, who arrives with a suitcase full of chocolate.  A bleached blonde rocker chick and a lesbian.  They’re rounded off by an Indian girl with an unpronounceable name, whose gimmick is that she’s Indian and speaks a bit funny.

A threesome between three characters we’ve never seen before ensues, in a bathroom cubicle.  The sort of cubicle that comfortably fits three people and only exists in badly-written films.  It’s not the disabled one, either, cos there’s none of those rails or lifting apparatus.  Anyway, they’re having a threesome and the Fat One goes for a poo in one of the other cubicles.  A plumber is sent to clear a blockage in the pipes, and for no reason his son pulls the giant PLOT DEVICE lever marked “Flow reversal”.  As all plumbers from the magical land of bullshit know, this forces the blockage back out of the sewers and out of a random toilet cubicle.  The force of shit causes the Fat One to fly off the pot and create a hole in the ceiling.  This all really happens.  The dorm building is condemned, and the nerds have nowhere to live.

Newly homeless, the nerds wander round campus checking out sorority houses.  There’s the weird Goths, which is funny because they’re different, the weird naked hippy girls, which is funny because they’re different etc.

We jump to a pool party, where Holly Valance simpers over how hot Victoria is, and a creepy guy’s trousers fall off for no reason, revealing a skidmark on his pants, and with the predictability of a You’ve Been Framed clip, he falls in the water.

Victoria has a boyfriend, by the way, who she treats like shit, forcing him to run around after her, that sort of thing.  She’s run away from the party to his dorm room, despite making it clear that she hates the hassle of screwing him.  “My balls miss your chin”, he says, romantically.

She ties his hands above his head and makes sure he keeps his eyes closed.  A quick spray of squirty cream on his balls, and she hysterically sets the dog to work to suck him off.  He doesn’t notice that it’s a dog.  The first thing that should have given away that it wasn’t Victoria is the number of calories in the cream.

Back at the party, the creepy guy overhears a conversation between two hotties, and comes to the conclusion that if he puts on an Irish accent, he’s guaranteed anal sex.  He tries, but inevitably ends up talking to two Irish girls who tell him to do one.  Him and his mates then wander into Victoria’s boyfriend’s room, and record the doggy blow job.  Don’t worry too much about this, as it NEVER GETS MENTIONED AGAIN.

We get our first glimpse of CONFLICT~! as Victoria’s Fashion Design homework is only judged second best, after the Mexican One.  Victoria’s boyfriend (from now: Doggy BJ) checks out Mexican’s ass, and gets a slap.

The nerds turn up at Victoria’s sorority and are allowed in, because of this piss-weak “diversity” excuse.  As though FHM, a magazine based around Photoshopping all women into interchangeable plastic is bothered about diversity.  Because it’s a sorority, the nerds aren’t just allowed to turn up and join in, they have to do some humiliating challenges.

They eat day-old sushi out of dog bowls and sleep with all seven of them in a tiny bathroom.  Next up, they’re challenged to go out and find 50 used condoms.  They should just look in Paris Hilton’s trailer.  The Indian One gets one stuck to her head as they wander through some gardens.  This next bit involves two gay chaps.  Can you guess whether they’re sensitively portrayed or just a pair of camp, mincing uber-bummers?  Of course you can.  That’s two more condoms checked off.

Doggy BJ catches wind of what’s going on and helps Mexican out.  They head back to his dorm room (which is different to his dorm room from earlier.)  His roommate is rocking a foursome with three half-naked girls, but when Mexican and Doggy BJ wander in, the girls all run out.  Doggy BJ hands her a giant ball of condoms that the roommate keeps, but Victoria chooses that moment to show up, and Doggy BJ takes the patented Stupidest Option Available, and throws the ball out of the window.

Mexican hides under the bed while Doggy BJ and Victoria screw.  She’s clearly still got her pants on, and is having a great time, despite hating sex just ten minutes ago.  Mexican just lays there for a bit while nothing happens.  Meanwhile, the condoms fall out of a tree onto a woman’s head.  She just stands there and comments that it’s raining come.

It seems that Mexican gets out of there with no problems, as that scene is never mentioned again.  More pledge tasks follow, as they lick Victoria’s feet, give foot-rubs to manky nerds and so on.  The Final Straw is a brilliant scene where the nerds have their flaws – fat bits, big nose etc – circled with marker pen.  Mexican even has “small titties” written on her chest, which is pathetic because her boobs are fine, and the same size as Paris’s.  So well done there.  Mexican storms off, and in a scene we don’t understand, a man sells her a boat in the shape of a chicken to live on.

Holly Valance and Creepy Guy get talking, and his latest plan is to pretend to be a virgin and sexually confused.  She gives him an indistinct tablet, Viagra, E or something, and he starts playing with her tits.  Mid blow-job, she’s interrupted by Victoria’s friend, who doesn’t seem to care what’s going on in front of her, but is terrified because Victoria’s dog is missing.  Holly runs off, and Creepy Guy has a trance, which leads to him waking up naked in the park with the Old One.

In the “Secrets of Sex” class, which is a real class really offered by real colleges in the States, Victoria uses a weird, fake version of MSN to tell her friend to get a boob job.  Victoria then gets on stage, where the professor is giving his lecture, and wordlessly clicks her fingers so the room resembles a strip club with all lights and music, and gives him a lap-dance.  She finishes to badly dubbed applause, and once again, the scene is never mentioned again.

Victoria’s friend wants to win the nerds back, so they have the required diversity for FHM.  Yes, that Paris-Hilton-thin excuse for a plotline is still going on.  The plan to win the nerds back is simple:  She’s going to cut the rope on the chickenboat so that the nerds drift down the river.  When they’re out there, she hopes that a redneck and Jackass’s Preston Lacy in a dress will climb aboard and be creepy, and then a hole will somehow be smashed into the boat so that it’s unliveable.  And you know what?  It only bloody works, doesn’t it?  The nerds wander back to Gamma Gamma whatsit.

A quick voiceover lets us know that they won the FHM competition.  Just like that.

The nerds are led on stage in white vests and blindfolds, while Victoria and her friends shoot them with paint guns.  They’re EVICTED FROM THE SORORITY.  Turns out that Victoria has gotten what she wants – the cover of FHM – and now the nerds aren’t needed.  As though FHM would feature the nerds at all!  They return to the sorority to find all their stuff thrown out on the ground.  Indian is relieved that her dildo is okay.

Doggy BJ finds Mexican and gives her the keys to the sorority.  A boy nerd gives them some miniature spy cameras, which they pop around the place.  They also search classmates.com for Victoria, and find lots of pictures of boys in pants, which means, er, stuff.

At the FHM launch party, Carmen Elektra turns up and tries to get off with Creepy Guy, but the Old One pretends to have kids with him and scares her off.  He’s then seen on all fours with her on his back, riding him like a pony.  If that makes no sense to you, then we have accurately conveyed this scene.  Indian and Fat both meet guys.

Victoria gets up on stage at the FHM event and gives a speech about how hot she is, and reveals that the cover is not the entire sorority, but just her.  The Old One distracts the backstage guy and plays a compilation of the footage recorded on secret camera.  The Gamma Gamma girls sing on the toilet, spit in food and are generally disgusting.  Brilliantly, the camera angles and the way the cameras move around shows that unless they were attached to an intelligent wasp, there’s no way the footage could have been shot in secret.  The most shocking thing of all is to follow:

Victoria English was ugly as a child.

Contain yourselves.

The crowd walk out in disgust.  Victoria gives a heartfelt speech about how she became a bully, and it’s not looks, it’s attitude that’s hot.  Because Victoria and Paris are basically the same person, we’re slightly undecided as to whether this is a sincere attempt at Paris atoning for his superficial life, or, more likely, a flimsy justification for the 90 minutes of “you must look like this to fit in” horseshit.

In the closing voiceover, Victoria says that she liked being on the cover of FHM so much that she bought the entire magazine company.  Which she could have done at the bloody start, and saved us all that pain.

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