Sorority House Massacre (1986)

Beth (Angela O'Neill) returns to school after her aunt dies and her friends at a sorority house take her in over the Memorial Day weekend, hoping that she'll pledge once she gets a taste of Sorority life.  Almost everyone is gone, leaving Sara (Pamela Ross), Linda (Wendy Martel) and Tracy (Nicole Rio) to keep her company and plan for the upcoming Pow-Wow.  Of course their boyfriends are in tow as well.

As soon as Beth enters the house she begins to see visions and have bad dreams.  In them a man calls her "Laura" and is chasing her with a knife, trying to murder her.  It just so happens that her entering the house has also triggered Bobby Henkel (John C. Russell), a violent mental patient, to escape from his facility and return to the house.  It turns out that what is now the sorority house was where Bobby murdered his entire family - leaving only one person alive.  It seems he has returned to finish the job.

In some ways this is a mash-up of more well-known horror films.  The opening shot, and indeed the music (and a good portion of the plot) are practically copied and pasted from Halloween, while the attempt to make a more female-oriented and less voyeuristic sort of horror film with a female director is reminiscent of Slumber Party Massacre.  I also can't help but see a lot of Black Christmas in this.

Despite the mish-mash, director Carol Frank obviously tried to make the best movie she could.  The dream sequences are effective and truly creepy (yes, there's a bit of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies here as well), while she makes a great choice in not making Bobby some sort of masked maniac.

The leads are generally unknowns, the acting is mediocre, but the direction is fine.  While it may be fun to guess all the different slashers it has taken from, it is also disappointing that there wasn't more creativity involved.  Frank, who was also the writer, certainly seemed capable of it.

Sorority House Massacre (1986)
Time: 74 minutes
Starring: Angela O'Neill, John C. Russell
Director: Carol Frank

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Image
Virtual reality has been one of the most hyped, and one of the most disappointing, promises of technology.  While it promotes immersion into a cybernetic world what it really provides are video games with 20-year-old graphics and the occasional bruise when one accidentally hits a closet door.  In the case of The Lawnmower Man  what it is promising is that something with graphics just a little bit better than Dire Straits's "Money for Nothing" video will somehow change the world and alter humanity. It was laughable then and it is laughable now.  The only person not laughing was Stephen King, who demanded that his name be removed from all future advertising for the movie because he never wrote this.  The story, of which a short film was made in the 1980s, involves a man unwittingly hiring a Greek god to mow his lawn and, after said god creates a spectacle, paying for the landscaping with his life.  It's only a few pages and, in my opinion, it is one of King's worst
Read more

Things (1989)

Image
Most of the time when I hear a movie is the worst ever I know that is hyperbole. There are few candidates and I would even say the famous book chronicling the worst movies ever made got it wrong.  Plan 9 from Outer Space is laughably incompetent, but enjoyable.  The worst kind of films are the ones where no joy can be found in the watching experience, for reasons ranging from unlikeable characters to just sheer boredom.  A truly horrible movie is something like  Things.   This is a 1989 direct-to-video horror film from Canada, filmed on 8mm and dubbed once it was completed and the makers realized most of the sound was unusable.  Director Andrew Jordan and writer Barry J. Gillis managed to grab porn star Amber Lynn for an hour to shoot her as a news reporter just so they could put her face on the video box.  Most of the music was done by Gillis, and some of it by a local band called Familiar Strangers.  It was filmed in large part in Andrew Norman's basement, and most of the props w
Read more

The Omen (1976)

Image
A movie does not have to be high art to strike a chord with the public.  The Omen was an attempt by writer David Seltzer to make some money and get a nice trip to the UK.  It just so happened that because of The Exorcist the public was hungry for more movies involving demons and such, and adding a veneer of Catholicism didn't hurt either.  The Vatican's secrets are most likely of more interest to scholars than anyone else, but a religion doesn't hang on over the centuries without creating a bit of mystery.  In this case, Seltzer settled on the Revelation of St. John, the low-fantasy portion of the Bible and, instead of an hilariously named (albeit historically correct) demon named Pazuzu, with The Omen we get the son of Satan himself.  When Robert Thorne (Gregory Peck) is informed that his child has died he visits a priest at the hospital in Rome where his wife is coalescing.  He is given an offer too good to be true: a foundling, whose mother died in childbirth, was born
Read more