User Reviews

This is exactly the type of film that embodies the 80's slasher-horror genre.

This film has great atmosphere, suspense, and some great kill scenes.

While the mystery and the twists are easy to see coming, that is mostly the fault of the genre over-doing this in the thirty years since this movie was released.

Spoilers:

As someone who has seen a lot of horror movies, I fully expected the killer to be someone else other than the mother. Early on, I never assumed the pregnancy had ended in a stillborn baby or anything like that. The movie does a good job of trying to get the viewer to buy that it is the mother who is borderline psychotic, and had I not been fully expecting a twist, I would have followed that line of thinking.

The acting is good enough for a movie like this. I think sometimes people expect Academy Award-winning acting out of horror movies and I think they miss the point. The acting isn't intended nor does it need to carry the film like in a drama.

The death scenes are done very well. In the age before CGI and multi- million dollar horror films, the production crews of these films had to use their minds to figure out how to do the impossible; kill someone on screen. Movies like this and Halloween do the death scenes very well. Action-in-the-shadow is a simple yet effective technique, as are the quick shots of someone getting stabbed. The shots are quick enough so the mind can't register that you are in fact looking at a fake body or a fake weapon, but just long enough so you see the person getting it.

I really can't fault this film for anything that other reviewers did. Maybe younger people, who didn't live in the 80's wouldn't appreciate something without top-notch effects or gallons of fake blood...I don't know.

Anyway, this is a classic slasher-horror film, before the genre got stale (forever) with constant sequels and remakes.

THE HOUSE ON SORORITY ROW is a standard slasher outing of the 1980s with an almost all-female cast. The plot has much in common with I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER, which came much later, and features a group of college friends who pull an unfunny prank that leaves a middle-aged lady dead. They decide to dump her body in a swimming pool to make the death look like an accident, but then the murders start...

This rather cheap film is pretty much par for the course for the genre. It goes for the gory rather than scary approach although the crude nature of the special effects work puts this far below an equivalent production like BLOOD RAGE. The back story is pretty ridiculous and clichéd and the film is never scary, but on the other hand it is fast paced with lots of incident. The best and most mysterious aspects of the script are borrowed from the French classic LES DIABOLIQUES.

I bought this on a 2-in-1 DVD and watched it just last night, and have to say that for what I was expecting I was pleasantly surprised.

As with any slasher, the story isn't overly complicated, although it does a good job of setting up a plausible scenario for the teens/twentysomethings in a big house being slowly stalked by something horrible.

Basically, the girls have finished university and want to have a party in their sorority house, but the house mother won't allow it - for some reason she always shuts the house earlier than all the others (Mystery and intrigue? You got it by the bucketload :). Led to revolt by Vicky, the girls play a prank on the house mother but it goes wrong, and then, at the party, the girls start disappearing...

The film has some good characters - for once we don't have an utterly virginal heroine whose morals are her strength. Instead we have several girls, most of them scared enough by what is happening to follow Vicky, the rebellious and selfish one, and the heroine as the only one who sees that Vicky is actually quite a stupid and uncaring bitch of a character.

By far my favourite bits were towards the end where the heroine has been injected with sedative and starts to space out...some relatively simple effects are used very well to create a thoroughly creepy build up to the finale.

My only criticisms of the film would be the ending, which seems somehow incomplete, and the killer's weapon - a walking cane which, while distinctive, just doesn't instill any fear in the viewer.

But the effects are great, there's some nice little set pieces, and overall I'd definitely recommend any slasher fans to watch it. It urinates from a great height on every slasher flick released in the last couple of years.

This movie isn't very scary, but it's never boring. The basement and the climax have tension, but the rest of the movie just isn't scary. In fact, there are more funny moments than scary ones: some girls at the party gush over how cute an average guy is when he gives the goofiest, cheesiest smile imaginable; Mrs. Slater tries to be intimidating, but the acting just comes off as cheesy.

There are some things that are confusing: the prank scene and Eric. When Vicki points the gun at Mrs. Slater, the girls think it isn't loaded because Vicki said it wouldn't be. She then points it at a lamp post and shoots it, breaking the glass. A friend comes up to stop her, and Vicki shoots her in the leg. They then reveal that it was a prank, and Vicki wasn't really shot. Then the gun goes off and Vicki accidentally shoots Mrs. Slater for real. What was really in her gun? Blanks, bullets, or a mix? If Vicki shot her friend with a blank, then where did the fake blood come from? And how did the lamp break if she was using blanks? For the lamp to break, she had to have been using at least some real bullets, but the movie never really explains how all this happened. The second confusing thing is Eric. The doctor says Eric died at birth and Mrs. Slater just pretends that Eric lives to make herself feel better. But during the climax, Katie fights the killer, who appears to be a man, and Ms. Slater seems to have been dead the whole time. If this were true, then how would the doctor have not realized the baby was alive? The baby he delivered was either already dead or died soon after, certainly before Mrs. Slater woke up. So assuming she got her baby back after for a funeral, the doctor should have realized the baby was alive. If this is what happened, the movie didn't make the twist very clear.

Sisterly spoilers

HOUSE ON SORORITY ROW starts off promisingly: the acting ain't bad. The camerawork is good. And the set-up is plausible. So I had high hopes for this film while watching it but then suddenly it turned bad, FAST! I have no idea why the quality of the film deteriorated so quickly but it happened right after the stupid scene with the woman who was attacked by the mysterious killer and helped by the film's heroine safely back into the house, only to have to watch the woman not go where the people were or where the party was happening but go alone in a bathroom on the deserted second floor, is when I gave up on it. The scene is just plain STUPID. The filmmakers wants us to believe that a woman who was attacked by a total stranger, didn't seek refuge where it would have been impossible for the killer to attack her again? Come on. But the scene in the bathroom itself is terrible and we've seen it a million times already. The rest of the film is pure junk. The gore effects were terrible. The hand that got stabbed looked like it was made of papier maché. In fact, everything involved with prosthetic effects looked like they were made of clay or papier maché.

The really crappy thing about HOSR is the heroine. She was a freaking pain in the butt with her noble and stuck-up attitude. The actress who played her, Kate McNeil, wasn't that good or interesting. Eilein Davidson should have been the heroine. She would have been a formidable heroine. I wanted Kate McNeil's character to die a slow and miserable death.

The direction and the script are at fault here. No one behind the caneras understands horror. The sub-plot with the doctor locking up the entire house was pointless. Scenes of McNeil having hallucinatory moments were truly laughable and amateurish. Hard to believe anyone thought those scenes were effective or added anything to the film. The many moments with the girls trying to get rid of the body reminded me of WEEKEND'S AT BERNIES. And the ending in the attic is unbelievable stupid and ineffective. No suspense or terror. And the very last shot of the movie, after the heroine made the killer fall from the attic down to the next floor, and the body of the killer is not moving or anything but then his eyes suddenly open. That's it. That's the last shot of the film. What happened after that? Did the killer murder McNeil's character ( I hope so)? Did the killer in the clown suit ran away and joined the circus? Did the two get married? Was the ending done in preparation for an eventual sequel that never happened(Arf!)? The whole ending left me with a big "Huh?" That has got to be the lamest ending I've seen in a horror film, and I've seen a lot of them.

To add more kookiness to this already wretched product is the undeniable feel that while I was watching HOSR I was actually watching a Brian De Palma movie. Then I read somewhere that the director of HOSR used to work with De Palma. Wow! No wonder HOUSE ON SORORITY ROW starts off great and ends miserably. It's a Brian De Palma trademark: aside from CARRIE, all of De Palma's movies have great beginnings, lousy endings. If I had known that the director used to work with De Palma, then I probably wouldn't have bothered to watch this flick.

This is one of your typical 80's slasher horror flicks similar to "Prom Night", "Friday 13th" and all that goes with it. A group of teens dicide to have a party at the owners expence and find out how mean she is when she does not like their behavior. The teens try and get even with the lady by accidently shooting her in a swimming pool and she later comes back to life and kills the girls one by one. This movie is fun to watch but it lacks more explanation as to who the killer really is. After all the girls are dead and only one is left, we find out that her friend the doctor had something to do with "bringing the old lady back to life". Then in the end we find out that it may be her "long lost son" that could have been the killer. Or was it the doctor himself? That was the only part of the film that I couldn't get. Other than that..... I liked it.

It's been a good week for the slasher genre. What with My Bloody Valentine 3-D doing impressive business at the box office and the special edition DVD of the original feature providing fans with all those eagerly anticipated gore scenes, this has been the best seven days for the category since the release of Scream in 1996.

I thoroughly enjoyed watching the special edition of MBV and it motivated me to dig through my collection and re-visit a few other cycle entries that had been gathering dust on my shelves. It seems to be the latest trend to remake eighties slasher movies and The House on Sorority Row looks set to be the next celebrated feature to receive an updated re-birth.

If titles such as Madman and The Prowler were rivals to the gore-led Friday the 13th films of the early eighties and were inspired by Sean Cunningham's visually graphic depiction of the slasher formula, then Mark Rosman's bizarrely under-rated entry took its lead from Carpenter's 'less is more' approach. Sorority Row does not boast a bunch of outrageously gory kill scenes and its bogeyman does not sport an audacious mask. It does, however, offer a slick suspense-fuelled runtime of classy directorial embellishments and down-to-earth and believable characters.

In order to get revenge on their unforgiving house-mother, seven sorority sisters plan an audacious prank. Unfortunately, the joke backfires and the elderly owner of the house ends up dead. The youngsters do their best to cover-up the 'accident', but it seems that someone witnessed the killing and begins to stalk and gruesomely slaughter them. Who could be behind the murders?

Slumber Party Massacre is generally recognised as the key sorority slasher, which is a shame, because The House on Sorority Row is much stronger and infinitely more deserving of that status. From the off we see that this is a cool and classy thriller thanks to Rosman's razor sharp direction and some tightly edited scares. The film successfully juxtaposes the innocence of child-like imagery such as clowns and dolls with the dementia of a revenge-fuelled maniac and creates a deeply macabre atmosphere. There's some chilling flourishes spaced frequently throughout the feature, which include the victims finding toys before they are slaughtered and the classic 'decapitated head in the toilet' trick.

The director skilfully mimics John Carpenter's use of shadow-play to build suspense and the bogeyman remains mysteriously shrouded in the darkness of his non-identity. Perhaps one of the film's key strengths is the realism of its characters. Many of the latter Scream-inspired slashers would fail because of their persistence in attempting to make a cast of purely beautiful people seem factual. Let's face it, we don't all look like glamour models and we don't all have a rich mummy and daddy a phone call away, so how can we relate in any way to a story depicted using that methodology? Rosman recognised this and instead of a giving us a synopsis full of brainless-bimbos, the characters here are natural and in effect, not without their flaws.

Rosman had previously worked alongside Brian De Palma and was the Assistant Director on Home Movies from1980. He learned a lot along the way and some of the stylish photography was particularly impressive considering that this was the twenty-four year old's feature début. The hallucination scenes towards the climax are creative horror-imagery at its finest and the operatic score is at times pulse-raising. That final scene, which sees the killer raise from the shadows in creepy clown attire, is as iconic as anything from the life-span of the genre and the fact that the heroine is heavily sedated only adds to the plausibility of her chaotic state of mind.

Credit also must be given to the cast who carry the plot comfortably and Kate McNeil was superb as the easily-manipulated Katharine. Eileen Davidson puts in a good stint as Vicky and the dramatics remain competent right the way through. Like many eighties slashers, the final version that was released was not as the director had intended and an extension to the ending was filmed and re-edited just before release. Let's hope that one day we will get a special edition disk with all the deleted scenes restored.

Rosman has stated in the past that he was not a particularly big fan of horror cinema and that he made this feature just to get a foot on the Hollywood ladder. That's somewhat tough to believe as House is a movie that's well-aware of its genre trademarks. The links with Halloween are too numerous to be coincidental and its doubtful that such stylish horror-imagery could be conveyed by a half-hearted auteur. The fact that Rosman is executive producer on the upcoming remake of this feature must prove that he still has a place for the genre somewhere in his heart.

Whether the remake will be a success or not is debatable. So far the casting decisions have both bewildered and disappointed. One of the key attributes to the strength of the original Sorority Row was its realism and the sympathetic motive of its bogeyman, which if lost in the re-imaging, could prove detrimental. We can only keep our fingers crossed that Rosman will not allow his greatest feature to be ruined by a cash-hungry studio, because The House on Sorority Row is deserving of so much more.

Easily one of the best of the early eighties slasher flicks; if you haven't already seen this suspense-marathon, you need to be asking yourself why not???

"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.