Movie Review: Sorority Row (3/10)

I can sum up very simply what's good about Sorority Row: Carrie Fisher as a house mother wielding a shotgun. The rest is pretty much a mess, so much so that we can't even enjoy watching the end of Audrina Partridge, the insufferable "star" of The Hills, who's murder sets the film in motion.


The tenets of sisterhood for the Theta Pis in the movie are: "Trust, Respect, Honor, Secrecy, and Solidarity," but really it's the fourth one that matters once a prank goes awry and Megan (Partridge) is killed. Her five sisters--Jessica, the bitch (Leah Pipes), Cassidy, the good girl (Briana Evigan), Ellie, the nerd (Rumor Willis), Chugs, the party girl (Margo Harshman), and Claire, the, uh, other one (Jamie Chung)--dispose of her body properly, by throwing it down a mine shaft, and vow never to tell anyone. When they return they say that Megan is missing, and somehow the mineshaft just minutes from campus is never checked.


Cut to eight months later and the girls are graduating, and not before one more big party, where, of course, one by one they start getting killed themselves. IT'S MEGAN! SHE'S NOT DEAD. Okay, it's not Megan, but that maybe would have made the movie more interesting.


The screenwriters and first time feature director, Stewart Hendler, clearly fancy themselves from the Kevin Williamson school of horror movies. The movie basically follows the same basic idea of I Know What You Did Last Summer, but there's no sense of irony or cleverness to the dialogue. The various subplots all just linger to give the characters something to do. People die because this is a horror film and they're supposed to, but not with any kind of style. None of the deaths are even that gruesome either. It's sort of like watching an episode of 90210 (the new one) that's gone a bit off the deep end. Only Carrie Fisher really understands the camp value of the whole thing, and god love her. She's in the movie ever so briefly, but she elevates a D-list slasher film all the way up to the C-list and all it takes are a couple of rounds off her shotgun.