Sorority Hos…The House on Sorority Row “remake”

In the 1983 classic The House on Sorority Row, a bunch of sorority sisters unintentionally (sort of) kill their mean house mother and dump her body in a muck-filled pool in the backyard. Of course, you can’t keep a good killing down, and soon, the girls pay for their sin as they are picked off one by one.

The remake also has a prank gone wrong, a house mother (awesomely played by Carrie Fisher) and sorority chicks getting killed off one by one, but this film seems to be more of a “sister” to I Know What You Did Last Summer than the film from which it gets its name (there’s not even a pool!). It’s actually more a throwback to those late 90s slashers that followed in the footsteps of Scream (can you believe the 90s are like 20 years ago now?).

Sorority Row isn’t particularly scary or suspenseful, but it is enjoyable. There are plenty of cute frat boys, sometimes shirtless. And this cutie happens to be the son of James Belushi!

For straight guys, there are slutty chicks, also sometimes shirtless. Plus there are some fun and unique kills and an awesome main girl. With her rough mannerisms and husky voice, she reminds me of Jersey Shore’s J-Woww (minus the boobieliciousness and the hair) and is very likeable, even if her character makes some decisions later in the film that are contradictory to how she is presented in the earlier part of the film.

The real show stealer is the stereotypical hot blonde bitch (doesn’t every teen film need one?), who has some of the best one-liners. But for some reason, most of them are delivered within the last half hour of the film. It felt like it took that long for the film to find its voice as a witty, campy slasher. But it’s all good. The last half hour of the film really needs that dose of camp because that’s pretty much when it falls apart. It suffers from one of those ridiculous “twists” in which the writers select the most irrelevant character in the film to be the killer just so that viewers will never guess who it is—and, um, still find it hard to buy even after the lame motive is revealed.

Definitely don’t go into Sorority Row expecting a high quality slasher or a horror comedy. It doesn’t succeed at either and is rather generic. It should have captured its more campy tone earlier on, because once it does, it really finds its stride.