Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

I kind of had a hankering see this here movie ‘Sorority Row’. I’m not sure why but maybe because I had warm feelings for ‘The House on Sorority Row’ when I saw that flick way back in the day as a teenager. Unfortunately there were no critics screenings offered for this movie in my neck of the woods, and its getting to the point where critics screening will soon be all but obsolete, so if I was going to see ‘Sorority Row’ I was going to have to come out of pocket… a very unpleasant thought. What the hell, a matinee showing is less than five bucks so off to the Cineplex I go. I enter this rather large 500-seat theater, three days after this movies World Wide Release and just as it is about to start I observe that I am the only person in the auditorium. Uno. Ichi. This during an evening matinee showing of a violent slasher flick with titties. What is the world coming to? Other than the fact I felt like a total perv being in a theater all by myself watching a movie populated with grown women playing teenaged girls, at least I didn’t have to turn my cell phone off. Hell, I even made a few phone calls and freely talked back to the screen a few times.

Note, if you’ve seen the ‘Sorority Row’ trailer you’ve pretty much seen the movie but here it goes anyway. The girls of Theta Pi are having a back to school blowout, the kind of which I NEVER saw while I was in college. The girls of the sorority who will be of interest consist of Jessica The Bitch (Leah Pipes), Chugs The Whore (Margo Harshman), Ellie (Rumer Willis) the shy / virgin / Nervous Wreck and an odds on bet to be the WE ALL GONNA DIE GUY in this movie. We also have Claire The Minority (Jamie Chung) with B.J. and the Bear’s baby girl Briana Evigan rounding out the cast of hotties as Cassidy the Final Girl.

So the girls are having this party and decide to play a practical joke on Chugs little brother which goes horribly wrong… I mean these chicks really know how to draw out a practical joke beyond all reasonable boundaries of practical joke protocol. So a house sister ends up dead during this joke and Final Girl wants to call the cops but The Bitch rationalizes that this will ruin their lives, which it will, and instead opts to toss this dead sister down a mine shaft with the full agreement of her other sisters, minus the Final Girl who they blackmail into falling in line.

Eight months later its graduation time and time for another monster party, but this time there’s an uninvited guest at this party. This guest makes themselves known to our murderous sisters by texting them saying, in essence, I Know What You Did Last Fall. As expected the Nervous Wreck freaks out. The Bitch tells everybody to chill and says mean things to The Minority. The Whore shrugs it off as she pursues searching for drugs for the party in between vomiting and having unprotected sex. She won’t make it back from her search. The Final Girl runs off to find comfort in her valedictorian boyfriend Andy (Julian Morris).

Again, if you’ve seen the trailer, you know it’s time to die but the question in this mystery is who is doing the killing and why? How many people have to die before our girls call the police? When will someone in a horror movie buy a phone with decent reception? Why do these chicks insist on walking off all alone by themselves? And ultimately will you care? I don’t think you will. But that’s just me guessing.

We watch a lot of Straight to DVD horror flicks here at the FCU and considering I watched ‘Sorority Row’ in theater all by my lonesome, I am curious how this slickly produced, albeit terribly generic horror flick didn’t end up going that route. There was nothing in this movie that was remotely original, different, unique or in any way separated itself from any other slasher flick that you might’ve seen in the last fifteen or so years. Nothing. I guess there was the ‘mystery’ of who was killing this slow-witted, distasteful group of young people but it really wasn’t much of a mystery at all. As the movie plays out there are three people who could be doing the killing. One is the obvious choice so we it’s that not the killer. Second is the character who was introduced in the middle of the movie who is setup to be our killer and as such we know this person is NOT our killer and third is the character who has no reason to be the killer and as such this is the killer and will be spotted out by anybody whose spent most of their lives watching these kinds of movies. We just need to know why this person is killing these people. Outside of doing society-at-large a huge favor. Seriously, you’re going to have to look long a hard to find a gaggle of hot chicks as distasteful as the hot chicks that populate the house of Theta Pi.

All that being said ‘Sorority Row’ isn’t a particularly bad movie as it hums along at a decent pace, though I think it still could’ve moved a little faster, there was plenty of violence, the occasional titty shot and a Princess Leia sighting. It just doesn’t do nearly enough to separate itself from the pack and really doesn’t warrant one grabbing a set a keys, getting into a car and driving out to theater to see it like I did. Tailor made for home video this ‘Sorority Row’.