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If there’s one woman who defines the 2000s, it’s Paris Hilton. The heiress to the Hilton hotel empire became the ultimate symbol of the era simply by living her glamorous, jet-set life in front of the cameras. Her two biggest claims to fame were a reality series with Nicole Richie and a leaked sex tape called “1 Night in Paris“. Honestly, I couldn’t tell you which came first—but by the end of 2003, everyone on the planet knew who Paris Hilton was. And when the whole world knows your name, opportunities like headlining a movie are bound to follow. After a few supporting roles, Hilton landed a series of starring gigs, including the infamous “The Hottie & the Nottie”. But the first film to give her top billing was 2006’s “Pledge This!”.
In Pledge This!, Victoria English (Paris Hilton) is the glamorous and ruthless president of the exclusive Gamma Gamma sorority at South Beach University, where beauty, wealth, and status are everything. When the sorority is chosen to be featured in FHM magazine as the hottest in the country, Victoria is determined to keep the image flawless. However, things spiral into chaos when a group of unconventional and less traditionally attractive girls are invited to pledge, threatening the sorority’s polished reputation.
After the success of American Pie, the 2000s were flooded with R-rated raunchy teen comedies, and “Pledge This!” is definitely one of them—though arguably one of the worst. While it leans hard into the raunch, it stumbles when it comes to actual comedy. Unless you find joy in scenes featuring Lin Shaye covered in feces or used condoms, this film probably won’t do much for you. Compared to “Pledge This!”, even the most offbeat Farrelly Brothers movie looks like high art.
The film’s biggest problem? Paris Hilton herself. She can’t act—at least not beyond playing a heightened version of her tabloid persona. The movie leans into that, casting her as a rich, judgmental sorority queen who sneers at anyone beneath her socioeconomic status, tossing around her signature “that’s hot” like it’s punctuation. Hilton essentially plays the villain, but because she’s the headliner, she dominates the screen. There’s even a voiceover from her that narrates everything we’re already seeing, as if the film assumes the audience is too distracted—or, more realistically in today’s world, doomscrolling on their phone—to keep up. And honestly? That might be a better use of your time.
On top of that, there’s barely a plot to speak of—and the little bit of story that is there only exists to string together a series of cringe-inducing set pieces, like Simon Rex receiving oral sex from Paris Hilton’s dog. Yes, you read that right. How many times has that joke been done before? I’m pretty sure it shows up in at least one of the “American Pie Presents” sequels. In “Pledge This!”, it just feels desperate—an attempt to shock for the sake of it, without any wit or originality to back it up.
I also had a hard time remembering who was who. The cast is enormous, and most of the women are interchangeable: slim white girls with either blonde or red hair, none of whom stand out in any meaningful way. The only truly memorable performances come from the two main male cast members—Simon Rex and Geoffrey Arend—as well as a handful of the so-called misfits, who, in a better version of this movie, would’ve been the actual stars.
Paula Garcés is the real protagonist here, and there’s no logical reason why her character shouldn’t be accepted into Hilton’s sorority—except for the glaring fact that she’s Latina. As she dryly observes in her voiceover, “I guess I’ll just have to put a blonde wig over this one”. The rest of the misfit crew are all reduced to cartoonish archetypes: the fat girl, the perpetually horny middle-aged woman with oversized breasts, the foreign exchange student, the black girl—you get the idea. Out of all of them, Kerri Kenney seems to be having the most fun as the middle-aged divorcee who joins the sorority purely to sleep with as many men as possible after learning her husband cheated on her. It’s wildly inappropriate, sure, but at least she brings some chaotic energy to an otherwise lifeless ensemble.
This movie even manages to screw up the nudity. I watched the unrated “naughty version”, which seems to be the only one still available, and even that can’t save it. The nudity feels completely shoehorned in—like a last-ditch effort to appeal to a horny teen audience—and it actually drags the film down. There’s a bizarre top-down threesome in a bathroom stall that feels totally disconnected from the rest of the scene, and a painfully long sequence of nearly naked sorority girls dancing around for no real reason other than to show off some bouncing fake breasts, which aren’t exactly the height of visual elegance. It might sound titillating, but it’s more awkward than arousing.
The result is an unfunny, shallow mess that might earn a stray chuckle here or there, but mostly had me staring at the runtime. At just 80 minutes (excluding end credits), it somehow still feels endless. The movie is, to borrow a phrase from Hilton herself: “not hot”.
