Unreal Movie Review: Sorority Row

You know what you’re going to get when you walk into a slasher movie called Sorority Row. Frequent flashes of nudity, copious amounts of blood and more often than not, the desire to stick a tire iron through your own brain.

Fortunately, Sorority Row understands this, and therefore they don’t make you suffer any more than you have to. There is no attempt at a back story, you’re thrown right into what is without a doubt, the world’s most retarded sorority prank gone wrong.

A guy cheated on his Theta Pi girlfriend, but is now getting back together with her at a party the house is throwing, where naturally, clothes are optional and there is no such thing as “campus police.” The girl’s sisters are watching the hookup on a laptop webcam, so when she starts to convulse from the roofies he‘s given her, they start to freak out.

But as it turns out, it’s a plan orchestrated by the girl herself, to teach the guy a lesson by PRETENDING LIKE HE KILLED HER. It’s like Punk’d, but life ruining! Not only does she have to play dead on the bed, phase two involves literally driving out to an abandoned quarry where the girls spread out to start looking for “sharp rocks to dismember the body” while the guy starts flipping out.

Then, logically, he stabs her in the chest with a tire iron. Because you know, it’s a part of the grieving process.

So when the not-dead girl officially becomes dead, the sisters all decide the best thing to do is to dump her down a mineshaft and pretend their idiocy never happened.

Yeah, if your gun is made by Mattel, you’re probably shit out of luck.

Well, eight months later, sorority sisters and frat guys start dropping like flies around Theta Pi, and spoooooky text messages imply that it’s their dead sister, who has flirted with God into letting her come back to life and kill everyone involved. And so begins the first of many plot holes in the story, because if this really was a revenge tale, it’s the girl’s own damn fault she got killed, since the plan was her bright idea, and even the guy isn’t really to blame, as he thought he was stabbing a corpse in the chest , however odd an idea that may be. But things are more complicated than “hot ghost gets revenge” and everyone becomes a murder suspect by the end of the film.

I have to give Sorority Row credit for a handful of truly grotesque murder scenes (it’s not easy to get me to cringe in a horror movie any more), but I find it rather lame that the promised nudity of the film is left to background extras, as none of the stars feel the need to disrobe throughout the course of the film. Where’s your artistic pride ladies?

Has anyone ever been a building where there was literally a fire axe on the wall?

The group of sisters is specifically designed to be a “diverse set” of girls, and each have their own one-dimensional role to play. There’s Elie (Rumer Willis) the hysterical one, there’s Chugs (Margo Harshman) the (extra) slutty one, there’s Claire (Jamie Chung) the hot Asian one, there’s Cassidy (Briana Evigan) the righteous one and finally Jessica (Leah Pipes), the bitchy one. Jessica is without a doubt one of the only redeeming things about this film, taking her role of bitch to an almost meta level. She doesn’t bat an eyelash when people start showing up dead, instead critiquing them on their ugly shoes or level of promiscuity. She’s often the voice of the audience, making fun of the absurd premise of the movie rather than addressing the emotional strain that should accompany the mass murder of everyone you know.

Sorority Row is a throwback to a type of slasher we haven’t really seen since Scream or I Know What You Did Last Summer. Granted those movies were much better acted, much better written and actually made sense at the end, but at least Sorority Row is trying. The ending is so insipid and reeking of “multi-twist” syndrome (that’s where you throw in a bunch twists in a movie to trick people into thinking you’re actually being clever) that even the killer themselves doesn’t have a good explanation of why exactly the mindless rampage took place.

It’s by no means good, but I will say it could have been worse. But that is in no way an endorsement of a sequel. In the words of the poster, Theta Pi must die.
2 out of 5 stars

God, you girls pick the worst ****ing weapons….