Ivan Reitman winces when he hears “gross-out” applied to Animal House , the movie that forever changed comedy. He understandably finds the term grossly limiting.
“We were sort of insulted by that term,” the Toronto-reared filmmaker says of his highly influential 1978 college laugher, which he produced and will help celebrate in a July 18 tribute at TIFF Bell Lightbox .
“It seemed too easy a moniker to put on what we thought was a pretty damned sophisticated script and movie. There was physicality to the movie . . . but the zit scene is like 30 seconds in the script!”
Ah, yes, the Animal House zit scene , often cited as a precursor of today’s gross-out movie trend. It’s the one in the campus dining hall where John Belushi’s wild Bluto fills his mouth with mashed potatoes, puffs out his cheeks and then spews the mess like a popped pimple into the faces of his outraged antagonists.
