There is one cinema gimmick that always works for me and can sometimes lift a movie out of the ordinary and take it somewhere unexpected. This usually occurs when someone either puts on a mask or appears in one. The simple act of doing this immediately brings something theatrical and visually arresting to the scene that taps into our subconscious on an almost primeval level.
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College life and the behavior of students and facility alike has been a source of inspiration for countless satires and parodies on the subject from the silent era (Harold Lloyd in The Freshman [1925], Buster Keaton in College [1927]) and early sound period (Laurel & Hardy in A Chump at Oxford [1939]) on up to more contemporary examples such as National Lampoon’s Animal House [1978], Van Wilder [2002] and Accepted [2006]. Certainly one of the funniest and most memorable of all is Horse Feathers (1932), a madcap burlesque of university life starring The Marx Brothers in which the institution of higher education is held up for ridicule and satirized mercilessly.
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Cinema Sojourns 