Review of The House on Sorority Row

"House on Sorority Row" appears to be one of the more decent early 80's slashers, thanks to a good pace and a reasonably high body count, but that's sadly all just a very misleading first impression. The more you focus on the clichéd and thin storyline, the more it gets overly implausible and stupid. Writer/director Mark Rosman tries hard to keep the actual identity of the killer a mysterious secret, yet even to the most brainless viewer it's already obvious since the chilling pre-credits sequence. Mrs. Dorothy Slater is your stereotypical unpleasant sorority housemother. She forbids the girls to organize parties, or to invite boys to their rooms and she even doesn't allow them to use the pool. During the stupidest college prank in the history of stupid college pranks, seven graduating girls accidentally kill her in the backyard. Six of them are willing to do everything to get rid of the body and pretend it never happened, so unquestionably they WILL die. The last one prefers to call the police and confess, so she still has a slight chance of survival. Shortly after, the girls (and some random idiotic guys) turn up dead in all the corners of the house. But...who's killing them? Could it possibly be Mrs. Slater's hideously deformed & maniacal progeny that she somehow managed to hide in the attic for 20 years without anyone ever noticing it? Yes indeed, this movie tries to make you believe that it's perfectly possible to keep a monster silent for several years while there are constantly attractive and scarcely dressed coeds hopping around the hallways. Yeah, right... The rest of the film is frustratingly mediocre. The murders aren't very spectacular, the acting varies from adequate (lead beauty Katherine) to plain awful (that's you, Morgan) and there's not as much nudity as you'd expect to see in a dorm slasher. The camera-work is rather professionally handled most of the times, providing the stalk-'n-slash sequences at least with a tad bit of suspense.