Sorority Row

A film like this has to be judged by its own standards, or those of its genre. Any attempt to compare it to cinema more widely, or art and literature as a whole, would result in calamity. There’s no mistaking who this film was made for and why. Five final year students at a sorority house in an anonymous University in the US accidentally kill their friend. They decide to hide the body, but nine months later, when they are graduating, something starts picking them off, one by one. This may sound very, very familiar, and it is. I Know What You Did Last Summer did this twelve years earlier. However, as I found out after watching the film, Sorority Row is a ‘reimagining’ of an 80s original: The House on Sorority Row. So the claims of which came first are perhaps moot. Nonetheless, Sorority Row cannot be said to be original or innovative in anything that it does. To a certain extent teen horrors aren’t expected to do this, but the best, and most famous, always stretch the boundaries of what’s possible within their limits. As with Lesbian Vampire Killers, it may seem relatively easy to make a film like this. There are, as Randy from Scream might say, certain rules that one must abide by in order to successfully make a horror movie. Sorority Row fails on several counts. Who, for instance, is the main character? We’re never really sure. This needs to be defined fairly early, unless you want to constantly tease the audience with who will or won’t survive – but this is a risky step itself. Is the killer frightening enough? Are they supernatural or human? Do they have a certain unique style, or way of killing? It seems some of this has been considered (the tyre iron), but not all of it. When we discover who the killer actually is, the reason for the killer to have acted the way they did becomes meaningless. This ‘reveal’, in fact, is one of the hardest things to pull off in these films. Here it is done poorly (someone spots something in someone’s conveniently open bag), although there is at least some surprise as to who it is. The murders themselves are so obviously flagged that they’re not at all frightening, gruesome, or even funny (as they sometimes are in the Scream franchise). It seems we’ve become so used to films like this, that we need them to be more and more extreme, leading to the torture porn in Hostel and Saw, which even I refuse to watch. The end of the film has multiple, anti-climactic conclusions and we leave it feeling we have experienced very little style, and virtually no substance. Even by the standards of the genre, this film is poor.