Five super-bitches and a bitch with a loose mouth get themselves into a whole heap of trouble in Stewart Hendler's Sorority Row ('09), a remake (that's a stretch) of Mark Rosman's The House on Sorority Row ('83), a film I saw at a grindhouse theater in downtown Detroit. It was a well made slash-and-stalk with a winning Richard Brand score.
If you have a decent girlfriend, boys, you will appreciate her even more after spending close to a hundred minutes with these disgusting excuses for human beings. I don't quite understand why writers Josh Stolberg and Peter Goldfinger decided to make every female character so goddamn unlikable in this. I'm not arguing that the world doesn't have more than its fair share of such knife-able trash -- it does. I'm just questioning the decision to not balance the movie with non-bitchy women. Did these writers have no positive female role models?
When every woman and man is a piece of shit, their bloody deaths have a cathartic effect only; there's no deeper audience involvement.Parts of this movie look like steals from Co-ed Frenzy, the film-within-a-film in Brian De Palma's masterpiece, Blow Out. There is a reasonable amount of nudity, production values are high, and the direction is not too hurried or choppy.
The big revelation is a little too so-what! to make a difference. The climax, which takes place in a burning house, has little credibility.The film's dialog is snappy and the cinematography by Ken Seng, who also shot Obsessed (a film I enjoyed a lot more), is pretty and functional.
The lack of warm characters does create tangible distance between story and audience. It's a hard film to embrace.
Although I enjoyed it, let's call a spade a fuckin spade -- it is still a horrendously unoriginal piece of filmmaking and adds exactly nothing to cinema.General audiences did not warm to this film; nor did they warm to Rob Zombie's equally unoriginal, less entertaining trade-off for a paycheck. It's a comforting thought that the shine may be going off remakes. Perhaps originality (relatively speaking) will make a comeback.
Imagine that.
