Schlock Corridor: Day Three

SORORITY HOUSE MASSACRE

"A girl with a mysterious past moves into her new sorority house and realizes it's the same house where her brother murdered the rest of her family."

Some girl named Beth shows up at her new sorority with a hairstyle patterned off of Bob Saget's coif in Full House, dressed in a goofy flannel top and pajama pants. Her personality appears to be missing, but nobody ever seems to notice this. As the short synopsis above states, the sorority house she's just moved into is also coincidentally the house she once lived in as a small child. One fateful night, her brother Bobby (who must be related to Beth, because he's just as empty-eyed and dull) just decided it was time to brutally murder his entire family, and only Beth escaped with her life.

And much like Daphne Zuniga's character in The Initiation, Beth has conveniently repressed all of this useful information, which I assume is supposed to add some kind of mystery to the narrative, but since the Netflix synopsis already told me all of this, there was nothing for me to attempt to figure out while watching this movie. And I was left forcing myself to stay awake during Sorority House Massacre's hour and fourteen minute run-time, because it was so dreadfully dull that it had nothing meaningful to offer.

The movie shoves in some bullshit pseudo-science early on about how family members often have a psychic link, explaining how Bobby breaks out of the loony bin the moment Beth crosses the threshold of the sorority house, like she just activated some supernatural tripwire. Beth spends almost every moment alone from this point in the film having visions of her tormented past, being stalked by the laziest-looking psycho killer I may have ever seen in a motion picture of this ilk. Seriously, the way he raises his hunting knife in a "threatening manner" just looks like he's tiredly reaching for a light switch in the middle of the night, completely neglecting to appear dangerous or unhinged in any way.

And this guy's face is just so doughy and boring that I could never see this asshole as a credible threat. Maybe that was the point the writer/director Carol Frank was trying to make, illustrating the banality of evil, but I couldn't give a shit. The actor who played Bobby, the late John C. Russell, has no other acting credits listed on IMDB, so maybe he never had any great passion for the craft and decided to walk away from the industry after sleepwalking through Sorority House Massacre. I don't care either way. I'm just glad he never acted again. Was this film trying to create a new Michael Myers with this killer? If so, then they failed. Spectacularly.

Is that it? Because Michael Myers didn't return to the big screen until Halloween IV: The Return Of Michael Myers in 1988, two years after Sorority House Massacre was released. And this movie is also about a psychotic killer who attempts to wipe out his entire family, always returning to kill the ones who previously escaped his wrath, which is what the Halloween franchise became starting with the second chapter. And perhaps Halloween V: The Revenge Of Michael Myers was eerily inspired by Sorority House Massacre, because that film features a family member (Danielle Harris' Jamie Lloyd, being Michael's niece) with a strange psychic link to the killer. It's something to think about, at least.

I suppose I have to give the movie credit for blatantly calling out the "knife-as-phallic symbol" trope of the slasher sub-genre in a scene where Beth's sorority sisters attempt to decipher the meaning behind her blood-soaked dreams. So have a gold star, Sorority House Massacre! After all, even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Christ, this movie is so dull. It has absolutely no energy behind it. It's just a series of scenes in a linear order, populated by a bunch of terrible actors reciting lines from a terrible script, punctuated by moments of lifeless violence that fail to provide any visceral impact. Character after character just gets lazily stabbed by a half-asleep madman, and the film never bothers to try and make me care. Everybody in the movie dies because nobody can make a single good decision. Just keep hitting him with the shovel until his head collapses like a soufflé! Don't stop because you just assume two medium blows to his back have killed him! You'd think these nimrods have never seen a slasher flick  before.

Nobody involved in the making of Sorority House Massacre had any passion for the film or the genre. This was just a paying gig for everybody, and it shows. A group of greedy, lazy assholes had a plan to make a slasher movie to try and make a quick buck.

And it apparently worked, because there's a sequel. And it's also on Netflix. And my Saturday has been ruined in advance.

YOUR TIME IS RUNNING OUT!