by: Letitia
Posted on 05.24.10 in All Horror Films > Slasher
Release Date: 1983

The 1983 slasher movie House on Sorority Row has pretty much every element you’ve seen in a slasher movie since then: clever-but-unlikely death scenes, girls at various levels of nakedness, the slutty girl/virginal girl combo, and the unstoppable faceless killer who can be everywhere at once. Although it’s completely predictable (with a few nice twists), House on Sorority Row is also incredibly fun–it does what 80’s slasher movies do best–it sells its gore and goofiness with a sense of humor. Although it lacks the real terror and interesting social commentary of Black Christmas (another early sorority house slasher), it’s worth a viewing to see how the college slasher genre invaded popular culture.

House on Sorority Row is about a group of senior sorority sisters of Theta Pi who decide to schedule a year-end graduation party in June, after the house usually closes. Their house-mother, Mrs. Slater, waving her cane and generally seeming a bit unhinged, vetoes the idea and insists that that they leave on the usual date. Afterward, Mrs. Slater finds Vicki (the fabulously slutty and impetuous house member) and her boyfriend tussling on Vicki’s waterbed and is so disgusted she punctures the bed with the head of her cane (which, of course, will come into play later as a useful weapon for impaling). From earlier, puzzling scenes in the movie, we see that Mrs. Slater has some mental disorder, but the opening scenes leave the exact nature of her problems a mystery until later in the film.

Vicki’s humiliation leads to her idea of playing a practical joke on Mrs. Slater involving her boyfriend’s gun (loaded with blanks) and the scummy sorority house pool, which Mrs. Slater is to cheap to keep up. All of the sorority sisters besides Katherine, the sweet and virginal one, agree immediately. Of course, as jokes involving guns often do, things go terribly wrong, Slater ends up dead, and the girls decide to hide the body and continue with their graduation party plans anyway.

What makes House on Sorority Row different from most movies of this genre is that it manages to be funny, tense, and scary all at the same time. In early scenes after Mrs. Slater’s death, the girls all nervously attend their party, afraid that somebody will find out their secret as frat boys dive into the pool and ask about Slater’s absence. After the murders begin, the movie cleverly misdirects the the viewer regarding the identity of the killer and the reasons for them.

The acting here is decent overall. Kate McNeil is dull and timid as the prim Katherine and Eileen Davidson steals the show as the aggressive, impetuous, and sexually-charged Vicki. Jodi Dragie as Morgan delivers her lines with a cluelessness that makes them hilarious. Try to watch her deliver the line how do we know if she’s still alive ?halfway through the film without laughing. Unsurprisingly, this was her first and only film, according to IMDb.

House on Sorority row doesn’t have depth or great acting, but it’s fun, lighthearted (as lighthearted as a movie that features a severed head in a toilet can be) and a great early example of the genre.

• ★★★★★

  Acting:

• ★★★★★

  Blood:

• ★★★★★

  Violence:

• ★★★★★

  Partying:

• ★★★★★

  Language:

• ★★★★★

  Humor:

• ★★★★★

  Predictable:

• ★★★★★

  Girls:

• ★★★★★

  Gore:

• ★★★★★

  Sexuality:

• ★★★★★

  Torture:

• ★★★★★

  Overall: