
We just love slashing. When a stores slashes prices, an administrator slashes the budget, or a running back slashes through the line, we pay attention. Easy to understand.
But our addiction to slasher flicks remains a mystery for the ages. And the been-there-bludgeoned-that do-over, Sorority Row, will do nothing to clear it up.
Sorority Row is a loose remake and update of a 1983 horror thriller called The House on Sorority Row. So in a quarter-century we’ve lost a house but gained a…what, exactly? Well, as this high-body-count throwback illustrates, nothing much.
One of the characters is identified in the credits as “Bra-clad sister.” That may be all you need to know about this exploitation item, which panders to not only the bloodlust crowd but the voyeurism fraternity.
The plot: a group of college sorority sisters, members of Theta Pi, try to cover up the death of their sister after a prank backfires, and they end up stalked by a serial killer.
Remember I Know What You Did Last Summer? Well, color this one I Know What You Did Last Semester.
These nubile coeds, juniors all, are sworn to secrecy and solidarity, no matter what. But the loyalty they feel toward one another is sorely tested when Cassidy (Briana Evigan), Jessica (Leah Pipes), Ellie (Rumer Willis — yep, Bruce and Demi’s daughter), Claire (Jamie Chung), Chugs (Margo Harshman), and Megan (Audrina Patridge) participate in an extended practical joke at a party, staging a mock death that gets out of hand to the point that one of their number ends up very dead indeed.
Their initial guilt-driven instinct is to confess. But, in the name of protecting their threatened bright futures, they agree to keep the accidental murder to themselves and and hide both the corpse and their secret forever.
Not bloody likely.
A year later, as graduation day approaches, they plan one final big bash at the sorority house before they say their goodbyes and disperse to begin their adult lives. And it’s during the party that somebody begins sending anonymous cell phone videos to them that were apparently taken the night of the tragedy, threatening to turn them over to the authorities.
Then a serial killer — who this might be, they don’t know — begins stalking and doing away with the sisters and their boyfriends one by one, and in slobberingly, sadistically graphic ways.
Taking a page from Scream, the seemingly invincible maniac is, of course, dressed in a hooded graduation gown, just like many of the legitimate party guests. So we can’t identify the psychopath without a scorecard.
Desperately, our “heroines” try to figure out who let the secret slip, who wants them dead, and how they might fight back or escape. And they’re aided by their hard-drinking, tough-as-nails housemother, Mrs. Crenshaw, played by Carrie Fisher. (Who says this movie has nothing in common with Star Wars?)
Director Stewart Hendler (Whisper), working from a by-the-numbers screenplay by Josh Stolberg and Pete Goldfinger — with Mark Rosman, director of the original, as one of his two executive producers — embraces all the tired conventions and cliches of the genre. The pity of it is that before and in between the murder scenes, especially in the early going, Hendler shows that he’s capable of not only exhibiting a sense of humor but also raising the artistic stakes, directing his cast to deliver in a way that raises our hopes, only to slash and dash them when the revenge killing begins.
As for the who-dun-it aspect of the R-rated Sorority Row, when it is eventually resolved and revealed, it couldn’t be any more half-hearted and arbitrary and ridiculous and forgettable.
Hungry for a few slices of Theta Pi? Help yourself.
Bill Wine – Celebrity News Service Movie Critic/ AHN
100 minutes
In theaters September 11, 2009
Rating: R, Thriller


