TheHouseonSororityRow

The House on Sorority Row (1983)

What happens when you combine a house full of beautiful, recently graduated coeds, a cranky old housemother, a mysterious secret from the past, and a prank gone terribly wrong? Yeah you get another slasher movie where a masked killer picks off some hot young things for reasons that might or might not make sense. Now I don’t want to sound like I’m ripping on this movie already, because the story is actually pretty effective. It opens up years earlier with the housemother, a much younger woman, in labor. Something bad happens to her baby and she is very upset by it. We see this same doctor telling her in the present that her course of action isn’t safe and that hospitalization is required. After the girls think they have accidentally killed her the body disappears and someone starts to kill coeds. So as you can see it is a pretty standard slasher movie.

That said I do have a couple of issues with the plot. First is that after an interesting opening that sets up much of the movie it really slows down for a good 20 or 30 minutes until the kills start. I get that the movie wants to introduce the characters, but the truth is they all just get killed off anyway so who really cares? For example there is an entire scene with one of the girls and her mother that introduces some friction between the two, which doesn’t need to be there because we never see the mother again! Also having the movie open like it does really doesn’t help that much, because right from the start I was expecting the “twist” ending. I suppose this could just be me and the fact that I’ve seen so many horror movies, but I do think The House on Sorority Row does a terrible job keeping the big twist hidden. One other thing that I needed to mention is that I kind of found the movie to be a bit uneven. At times it plays like a serious slasher movie, then it wanders off into comedy hell with a Weekend at Bernie’s vibe while the girls are carting around the elderly woman’s body. Hell they even run into a cop (literally) with here in a garbage bin! This said after the kills start the movie does pick up speed and is a pretty good watch from there on out. Plenty of nudity, some limited gore, fun kills, and a couple nice jump scares.

Speaking of gore there are a couple good kills in the movie, which has a respectable body count of 8. There is a neat cane thru the throat that was fun and a nifty throat slashing that worked nicely. But while watching the movie I was wondering if it were heavily cut up when it was released. There are several off screen kills that I was disappointed in and could have been cool. We don’t even get to see the after effects of the damage done because all the bodies end up in a pool, which kind of sucks.

In the end The House on Sorority Row is an average movie that fits nicely with the middle of the road slasher movies from the 80s but doesn’t stand out. Unless you are a collector and need to own every slasher movie ever made I recommend a rental of The House on Sorority Row. I doubt that I’ll ever watch my copy again.

2 ½ out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer