The House On Sorority Row

No genre of entertainment has been more consistent in punishing the guilty than horror.  From Poe’s The Black Cat to the deliberately gruesome morality tales depicted in the notorious Educational Comics of the 40s and 50s to scolding anthology films like the Creepshow series, the fuck-ups almost always get fucked up.

The House On Sorority Row clearly wants to be a part of this longstanding tradition.  But because it’s not particularly well produced and so shamelessly steals from earlier horror films there’s very little originality to shudder at.

Consider the crisis at its heart.  Seven sorority sisters, all college graduates on the verge of starting their independent, adult lives, are at war with their house mother, a strange, crotchety old woman with a sad secret.  They want to enjoy one last blow-out in their dorm.  She wants them out so she can be left alone.

Their continued, unwelcome presence gets her angrier and angrier.  Despite requesting their exit, they have no plans to cancel their big party.

One of the women, future soap star Eileen Davidson, gets it on with her boyfriend one evening in her room.  The house mother hears them from upstairs, walks down to confront them and interrupts their lovemaking.  She takes the bird handle of her cane and proceeds to wreck her waterbed.

It’s the last straw.  Davidson wants revenge.  The girls agree on pulling a prank hoping it will scare her off.  All it does, of course, is make things that much worse.

We know that Davidson is a crack shot.  Her boyfriend allows her the opportunity to target practice with his piece and she has perfect aim.  She hits everything in sight.  So, Davidson will purposefully shoot around the old lady to send a message.  Oh, she gets the message alright, especially when the laughter starts.  After whacking snotty Davidson with her cane, not realizing there’s still a bullet in the chamber, the careless sorority sister accidentally pulls the trigger.  She doesn’t miss this time.

Kate McNeil, the only one with something of a conscience, urges the calling of an ambulance but is talked out of it because of the potential repercussions that would befall the entire group.  So she reluctantly relents.  A cover-up is spontaneously proposed and implemented.  Collective worrying over exposure immediately begins.

If this storyline sounds awfully familiar, it’s probably because you saw the original Prom Night.  In that laughable disaster, a bunch of jerky kids bully a young girl to her death and decide not to tell anybody about it.  But there’s a witness who waits until they’re all ready to graduate from high school to seek homicidal vengeance on her behalf.

The killer in The House On Sorority Row is far less patient.  Having secretly witnessed what happened, they start their murder spree the night of the dorm party.

Because the old lady’s wrapped-up body eventually goes missing, the seven sisters start freaking out, wondering aloud if it’s at all possible she’s still alive having somehow managed to get untied and out of that disgusting pool.  It never occurs to them that someone knows their secret and wants to become Judge Dredd.

This part of the story is clearly inspired by Friday The 13th Part 2.  At the end of the first movie, Mrs. Voorhees gets beheaded by the Final Girl.  In the sequel, we learn that her son Jason, who didn’t drown at summer camp after all, saw the whole thing undetected and in the following scene, tracks down his mother’s killer to begin his own, overlong reign of terror.

The House On Sorority Row starts with a flashback sequence involving the old lady as a younger, pregnant woman.  She goes into painful labour and it’s not clear what happens to her baby.  Eventually, we learn the truth.  There are striking similiarities with the psycho in the hockey mask.  That’s not a good thing.

Near the end of the film, the killer is seen in shadow.  That sure looks like a woman’s wig he’s wearing.  Is he pulling a Norman Bates from Psycho?  The movie never addresses it, but again, not an original concept.

Not content to recycle these plots and gimmicks, The House On Sorority Row also maintains the slasher tradition of having the killer square off with the last survivor, the aforementioned Final Girl.  (It doesn’t take a genius to determine who that will be.)  But it clearly doesn’t want to conclude predictably, judging by that last shot and confirmed by the film’s writer/director in a Blu-ray extra.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter anyway.  This isn’t scary.  The movie takes way too long to establish its generic plotline but even after it gets going, not only are we not shaken, we’re not stirred, either.

That said, the bird-handle cane is cool and certainly a creative lethal weapon.  Too bad it’s not used by a truly terrifying heel.

The House On Sorority Row is by no means awful, although I would’ve hired a better party band than the thankfully shortlived 4 Out Of 5 Doctors.  (Some of their lyrics are really silly, their outdated New Wave grooves hookless.)  It eliminates the sexism that plagued many horror films of its time.  And there’s one very funny quip from a party attendee.  Cheaters never prosper, dude.

Kate MacNeil is sympathetic up to a point and Davidson, who looks like a bad girl, certainly exercises questionable judgment in all kinds of ways, even though I didn’t really hate her as much as I should have.  As for the old lady, she’s not as convincingly nasty as she could’ve been and because her closely guarded secret is a stolen plot device, I didn’t care about her bogus trauma at all.

The most interesting character is the old lady’s longtime physician, a supremely mortified screw-up who sort of explains to the Final Girl what happened in the opening scene.  (Who else went through this unclear experimental procedure?)  Like Davidson and the sorority sisters, his reputation matters above all other considerations and he too will continue to make instantaneous decisions that will bite him in the ass.

Self-preservation is a major Achilles heel in this movie.  Unbeknownst to the clueless cast of characters in The House On Sorority Row, it’s one of the many reasons you can get brutally punished in a horror film.  Making a bad hybrid rip-off should be added to the list.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Wednesday, February 20, 2019
3:44 a.m.