Review of Sorority Row (2009) by Filipeneto — 04 Jul 2020

This film is a remake of "The House on Sorority Row", an old and forgotten horror film from the 1980s, and it is hardly worth it since it does not bring anything new or different, when compared to other teen slasher films like "I Know What You Did Last Summer". In fact, it is extraordinarily similar to this last title, almost a chewed copy.

The script is basic: a group of university students about to graduate ends up killing a friend in a stupid joke. Afraid of the consequences that this could have for their future life, they decide to cover everything up and throw the body into an abandoned mine shaft. Months later, however, someone who knows all the story appears and begins a killing spree, threatening to tell the truth.

It is a vulgar and poor film, that combines two perfectly bad cinema genres: the slasher, full of fake blood and brutality, and the teen film, with all the youthful stereotypes, almost pornographic nudity and an obsession with everything related to sex and alcohol. The script is lazy and stupid, in that it doesn't bring anything that hasn't been seen in much better films and the characters were profoundly underdeveloped, ranging from tasteless to execrable, which results in our total indifference to their imminent death. We limit ourselves to counting the corpses.

I feel like I need to talk about the cast, but I really didn't want to. Dominated by female actresses, which is to be expected in a film that takes place in a girl sorority, there is not a single good actress. Briana Evigan, Leah Pipes, Caroline D'Amore (what an expressionless face, by God!) and also Rumer Willis are the actresses with the most screen time but none of them shone. Still, in the midst of chaos, Willis seemed to give us a more solid work. Of course, much of this disaster can be attributed to the inability of the director, Stewart Hendler.

Technically, it is an uninteresting film. Cinematography is quite regular and the special effects helped at the right times, but none of this makes up for the flaws I mentioned earlier. The deaths are quite brutal and may please those who like to see it, but they end up being relatively clean.