Directed by Carol Frank
Starring Angela O'Neill, Wendy Martel and Pamela Ross
I've seen something like 2,084 slasher films in my life, and Sorority House Massacre is definitely one of them. We're off to a rip-roaring start with this review, aren't we?
Flashback to the '80s, where there were a whole slew of "Massacre" titles released within a few years of each other. Slumber parties, beach houses, nail guns complete with amazing evil laughing bad guy. Name the locale or the weapon and we got it during this period. This particular movie has a little bit of an interesting twist in that it was partially produced by the legendary Roger Corman and it has the incredibly rare quality of being both written and directed by an Honest-to-Christ FEMALE, one Carol Frank. We need more female slasher directors. Thus ends the Lick Ness Monster Women in Slasher Movies initiative. With that background, I was actually pretty excited to click "Play" on this bad boy and let it unwind...but alas, it's not very good.
If you're even a casual fan of horror movies, you've basically seen this one before. Let's break down what we're dealing with here.
SLASHER MOVIES FOR DUMMIES, as pioneered by the great John Carpenter (and perfected/ripped off by Sean Cunningham):
(1) The past evil, embodied by some bad incident from the days of yore that comes back in the present day;
(2) A group of good-looking kids in a cut-off environment;
(3) Various circumstances that ensure that the clueless adults can't help the kids in peril.
This would be Sorority House Massacre to the letter. Slasher movies were a dime a dozen at this time, so you don't see a movie like this one for its subverting of genre rules or anything. It's all about the execution. Unfortunately, that's where the flick falls way short.
The main character is Beth, played by Angela O'Neil doing her best Jamie Lee Curtis impersonation. As a kid, Beth survived a horrific murderfest propagated by her brother Bobby (John C. Russell). Bobby is still in an asylum, and you can take three guesses as to who will crash Beth's party. O'Neil is a decent-enough actress all things considered, but that might be slightly skewed considering what we're dealing with around her. The plot has Beth at some college that I'm not even going to look up the name of on Wikipedia wanting to pledge to a sorority (shocking, I know) and spending her first few nights at the house. The 74-minute run time leaves precious little moments to introduce all of the surrounding characters, and it's a good thing, because it covers all the bases of slasher movie stock characters quite well. We've got the rich girl, the slightly bitchy girl, and the fellow nice girl who maybe-sorta might survive along with Beth at the end. It's not really interesting, with the exception of...
AMAZING SCENE ALERT. Roughly 20 minutes into the movie, Rich Girl leaves to do...something, I can't quite remember what. T kill time, the other girls decide to invade her expansive closet and try on her clothes, complete with CLOTHES-TRYING-ON MUSIC MONTAGE. If that wasn't great enough, throw in the quick cuts of clothes flying in the air in time with the music and you've got some George Carlin-esque levels of comedy.
See, Beth is having all of these weird visions as she walks around the sorority house. Through some miracle, it's the same home that Bobby killed her entire biological family in, with the script using that convenient "she blocked it out" thing to write this inconvenience off. There IS a little bit of a twist here in that Beth and her brother seem to have a psychic link, with the latter sensing that his surviving sister has returned to their home. Which means that it's time to break out and start killing people. It should also be said that his breakout scene involves such cunning tactics as waiting behind a desk with a zombified look on his face and then simply getting up, nailing a double axe-handle smash and leaving. Not quite another Amazing Scene, but it's close.
I love horror movies, but I'll be the first guy to admit that riveting plots isn't why I (and many other people) watch a lot of them. Some horror movies have deep, subtextual plots, but definitely far from a majority. For most horror movies, it's all about the fun factor. Sorority House Massacre is severely lacking in this with the exception of those two borderline hilarious moments that I've already mentioned. There's no Tom Savini or Rob Bottin-level gore effects to gawk at, there's no creative kills (it's mostly just relatively bloodless stabbings), there's not even any Crispin Glover-style quirky side characters to get involved with. And...oh yeah, that's right, all of the side characters' boyfriends show up halfway through the movie, and the whole thing becomes suicidally boring with romantic subplots for like 20 minutes just before the killing starts. Which promptly killed most of the interest that I had with how this turns out.
When it was released, this movie got a lot of criticism for its similarity to Halloween, and it's a fair complaint. It pretty much ripped everything right out of the John Carpenter playbook word-for-word, with the exception of the lead heroine's psychic link with her psycho brother. What we've got here is Halloween with all of the atmosphere, awesome music, slow-burn murder sequences and likable characters removed. So...Rob Zombie's Halloween, then. Wow. Amazingly, in Zombie's SECOND Halloween film, he even had his hick version of Laurie Strode do the "psychic bond" thing with Michael. I think I'm on to something here. Illuminati proof confirmed.
That's about all I've got to say about this one, other than what the killer LOOKS like. As in, he's pretty much just a regular dude with a regular haircut. Kind of funny considering the way-over-the-top weird faces and masks that populated this era, but it doesn't make the movie much more interesting. Yeah, kids, this one wasn't exactly a classic, and the best part is that there were TWO MORE of these godawful things that I haven't watched yet. * 1/2 out of ****.
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