Schlock Corridor: Day Four

SORORITY HOUSE MASSACRE II

"Five scantily clad co-eds, unaware their new sorority house was the site of a murder, inadvertently raise the killer's spirit with a Ouija board."

Sorority House Massacre II is not a sequel to Sorority House Massacre. I thought it was a sequel. It's billed as a sequel. But it's not a sequel. This movie has absolutely no connection to the original Sorority House Massacre, aside from both titles being produced by Roger Corman. Yes, the plot revolves around five sorority sisters moving into an old, run-down house that was the site of a murder several years prior, and yes, they are eventually stalked and killed one-by-one by a psycho killer, but this is not the same sorority house from the first movie, and the killer is in no way related to the killer from the first movie. It's a completely different fucking killer!

Why did they do this? The girls do attempt to contact the now-dead killer during a séance, giving him the opportunity to kill again from beyond the grave, so why couldn't it just be Bobby from the previous film? That's all they had to do to justify the "II" in the title. It's not like they were dealing with a licensing issue, considering the movie is called Sorority House Massacre II, and both films were distributed by Concorde Pictures/New Horizon, so what's the excuse?

When the creepy red herring guy (Peter Spellos, playing a character named Orville Ketchum and credited in the film as Orville Ketchum playing himself for reasons) shows up late at night to frighten the girls with the grisly exposition dump explaining what horrific events occurred in the old house some years earlier, the "flashback footage" is actually footage taken from another Corman production, being Slumber Party Massacre. However, the lazy narration reframes this repurposed footage not as an escaped psychopath randomly targeting a group of vulnerable young women, but rather a family man who goes mad and carves up his wife and children before being thwarted (via a very big knife) by some random neighbor lady.

It's especially amusing to see that, according to the narration, the sweaty, bug-eyed, middle-aged killer apparently married a pretty young woman in her early twenties, and got his kicks playing dead underneath a soiled blanket in the living room of their house.

The introduction of this footage actually makes Sorority House Massacre II not a sequel to Sorority House Massacre, but rather the sequel to a version of Slumber Party Massacre that does not exist in our reality. Wrap your mind around that.

And at least the original Sorority House Massacre bothered to show our lead actress attend a class for one scene. Sorority House Massacre II never even sets foot on campus. If you missed the first five minutes of the movie, you wouldn't even guess that these characters are in a sorority. You'd just assume that these five young women are all good friends who are squatting in an abandoned house, getting drunk, contacting spirits, and generally re-enacting the hormone-driven wet dreams of your average adolescent male by either getting naked for seemingly no reason, or just spending all of their free time wearing skimpy lingerie, because clothes are for squares.

Yeah, if you're looking for T&A, this is the movie for you. Around twenty-five minutes into the movie, all five primary actresses appear at least topless in quick succession, including what may be the first tag-team shower scene I may have ever witnessed. And one by one, they all "get dressed for bed", which in this bizarre universe means they all find their smallest, tightest, most sheer lingerie and put it on so they can sip tequila and contact a dead mass murderer.

The rest of the film, with one important exception, involves following these characters in their lingerie as they are hunted by what they think is their skeevy neighbor Orville, but the real killer turns out to be one of their own, possessed by the spirit of the driller killer from Slumber Party Massacre. The movie even manages to force the girls outside in a rainstorm for a brief interlude, where their lingerie of course gets very wet, and quite transparent. As a consequence, the final fifteen minutes of the movie very clearly display lead actress Robyn Harris' pubic area through her white underwear, providing the kind of visual distraction that would make an excitable 12-year-old boy's head explode.

And that important exception I mentioned earlier? A nearly ten-minute-long sequence in a strip club. Two police officers who are kinda-sorta on the trail of a dead killer... wait. I just realized that this police sub-plot makes no sense.

Very early in the film, we're introduced to these two cops as they are turned away from a washed-out bridge during a rainstorm while trying to reach the old sorority house. The older male cop reminds his partner that they've just received a distress call from the neighborhood where a whole bunch of people were murdered five years earlier, and they need to get there fast, before it happens all over again. But who called the police?

At this point, nothing had happened yet, so who called, and what exactly did they say? The killer hadn't even been summoned by the séance, yet! What the fuck were they investigating?

Eventually, these two intrepid cops arrive at a strip club, where they sit back and watch a nubile young woman perform for a crowd of bizarre stereotypes, including a pair of delightful Middle Eastern caricatures credited as "Abdul" and "Schmabdul". We watch her entire routine, including some impressive pole work that puts Elizabeth Berkley's routines in Showgirls to shame, and then we watch another young woman take her clothes off for a bit while the first stripper, a girl named Candy, talks to the detectives.

As it turns out, she and her sister (who has been conveniently institutionalized and is therefore unable to appear onscreen, because nobody wanted to bother to cast actress Robin Stile to appear in this movie outside of stock footage) were the sole survivors of the previous massacre, and the lead detective asks her a few questions about the fatal night that he surely already asked her a hundred times five years ago, and she offers no new information, making this entire sequence entirely fucking pointless.

It added absolutely nothing to the narrative, and it exists only to a) provide copious, completely gratuitous nudity, and b) pad the film's running time, because without this sequence, Sorority House Massacre II would not have qualified as a feature-length motion picture by MPAA standards, prohibiting it from any potential theatrical release. It's just filler. And it's actually insulting.

Hey, I like nudity. I'm a pretty big fan of naked women, as anybody who has ever visited this blog would immediately learn. And there are some very attractive young women in this movie, and I greatly appreciate their willingness to disrobe for their craft. And yes, gratuitous nudity is a staple of the genre, and part of why I love it so, but this film clearly doesn't have many tricks up its sleeve, and ends up going back to the T&A well far too many times. I got bored watching these scantily clad women cavorting around an old dark house long before the film was over, and I'm honestly shocked by that fact, because I never thought I could get bored by this stuff.

And what's with the terribly executed attempts as comedy? There are these odd little moments of supposed levity sprinkled throughout the film, all revolving around the Orville Ketchum character, and they never work. For example, early in the movie, Orville is searching through a stack of old newspapers with headlines pertaining to the massacre that occurred in the old house, and the final newspaper headline simply reads "Elvis Lives!". Ha?

The final ten or so minutes feature Orville getting stabbed repeatedly by Robyn Harris, then strangled with a chain, then drowned in a toilet bowl, then stabbed by the girl possessed by the dead killer, before finally getting blasted by a pair of beat cops with shotguns, putting him down for the count. Until a fake news report during the end credits reveals that Orville recovered from his many fatal wounds, and has just been released from the hospital, in the care of his buxom young nurse (?) Candy.

This shit isn't funny. It's just not funny. Why is this even in the movie? Aside from these moments, there really isn't any comedy in the movie. It's mostly played pretty straight, which makes the Orville Ketchum material stand out quite badly. None of this shit should have been in the movie, because it ends up feeling like a horror spoof is repeatedly trying to sneak into a relatively straight-forward slasher flick, cheapening the whole experience with its mere inclusion.

I blame Jim Wynorski for directing this garbage.Granted, he has exclusively directed garbage since he started his career, so it's not like I expected anything more from him in this case. And to be fair, I didn't hate this movie. It's certainly better than the original Sorority House Massacre, which isn't saying much, but there it is. The main actors aren't necessarily all that good, but they're certainly more memorable than anybody from the first film. It also has more nudity, which I guess is a plus, but as I mentioned earlier it gets a little boring by the end.

It held my interest, which is enough. That makes Sorority House Massacre II better by default.

YOUR TIME IS RUNNING OUT!