Sorority Row

Sometimes when I'm watching a rather run of the mill or drab movie, the slightest one-liner can make me laugh, just because it's unexpected. Such was the case in Sorority Row, when some college girls discover the rotting corpse of a friend who has been dead for about a year, and is now found hanging from the ceiling in their house. The girls' response? Instead of screaming, one of them cringes in disgust, and simply says in all seriousness, "Oh my God, it's Megan. She looks horrible".

Not exactly sparkling wit, but in a movie like this, I take what I can get. I also liked Carrie Fisher's character. She plays Mrs. Crenshaw, the House Mother of the sorority girls, who seems quite calm and level-headed for most of the film, but when things start to get out of control, she somehow gets her hands on a pump-action shotgun, and starts shooting at the mysterious killer who is picking off her girls. I liked these things, because they caught me off guard with their absurdity. If only the rest of Sorority Row could be so surprising. The rest of the movie is depressingly mundane. It recycles the 80s slasher cliches with plenty of energy, but not a whole lot of imagination. You've seen it all before, and the movie seems to know it. The little one liners thrown into the screenplay by Josh Stolberg (Good Luck Chuck) and Peter Goldfinger (TV's Avatar: The Last Airbender) seem to almost be there to keep the writers awake at the word processor.

The movie itself is a remake of an obscure 1983 slasher called The House on Sorority Row, which has been unseen by me, and will most likely remain so. Despite this, anyone who has seen 1997's I Know What You Did Last Summer will find the material here quite familiar, as well. As they begin their Senior year of college, the head girls of the Theta Pi sorority get involved in a prank gone wrong. A girl named Megan (Audrina Patridge from TV's The Hills) learns that her boyfriend (Matt O'Leary) has been cheating on her. So, Megan and her Theta Pi sisters play a prank where Megan pretends to die during sex, and the rest of them go out with the boyfriend to hide the body, hoping to scare the poor dope. When Theta Pi "queen bee" Jessica (Leah Pipes) jokingly suggests that they look for something sharp to dismember Megan's body, the boyfriend takes her suggestion a little too literally, and winds up actually killing Megan by stabbing her with a tire iron. After much panicking, the group decides to hide Megan's body in a nearby mine shaft, as if word of the murder got out, it could ruin their dreams of a successful future.

The story fast forwards to Graduation Day, and the girls have managed to keep the death a secret all this time, though it's obviously taking a toll on two of them - Good girl Cassidy (Briana Evigan) and timid Ellie (Rumer Willis). It's right about this time that all the girls involved in the incident start receiving threatening text messages on their cell phones by someone who knows what they did that night. Not long after that, a mysterious figure dressed in a black graduation cloak and hood starts roaming the campus, armed with a souped up tire iron weapon, and begins picking the girls off one-by-one. Is it the boyfriend? Is it Megan's sister (Caroline D'Amore), who started appearing around the campus around the time the killer did? The answer, which I will not reveal here, is pretty underwhelming, and makes less sense the more logic is applied. You'd also think the killer would be spotted by more people, since the cloaked and hooded figure makes little effort to hide itself during the film, and is always brandishing that weapon everywhere. Subtlety is obviously not what this movie is aiming for.

What Sorority Row is obviously aiming to be is a fun throwback to the slasher flicks of my youth, and while that's admirable, there never seems to be a lot going on at any time. It takes almost an hour for the killer to show up. There's too much set up, and nothing really that deserves much time devoted to it. Even when the tension is supposed to be ratcheting up, the movie never quite raises any suspense. Then again, it's hard to raise suspense when it's glaringly obvious who's going to be alive, and who's going to find themselves at the receiving end of the killer's tire iron by the end credits. The movie follows a tried and true formula, and that's just the problem. Aside from a handful of clever, self-knowing lines, the whole thing's on autopilot. We start waiting for the obligatory scenes when the girls will separate, or start creeping around dark areas to investigate on their own. The killer strikes, the girl screams, we yawn.

Watching this movie, I thought back on My Bloody Valentine 3D. That film also tried to capture the mood and spirit of an 80s slasher, and did a better job of it. It was livelier, more atmospheric, and had better kills for the villain to pull off. Compared to that, Sorority Row just doesn't stand out. It is, however, a better movie than both The Final Destination or Rob Zombie's Halloween II. Not saying much, I know, but considering the other options out in theaters for horror buffs, beggars can't be choosers.

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