Peereddi
I was totally surprised at how great this film.You could feel your paranoia rise as the film went on and as you gradually learned the details of the real situation.
Merolliv
I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.
Keeley Coleman
The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;
Jerrie
It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...
jadavix
"Sorority House Massacre" is one of those movies with constraints in budget or talent or both that prohibit you from making any investment of time or consideration in anything that happens on screen.It's like watching a movie playing in the house next door and you're trying to peer through the window to get a good look at the screen. Maybe there is one or two moments in it where you would have liked to understand what's going on, but you can't, because the budget is so low that it keeps you outside, or maybe the actors are too bad to generate interest, or perhaps it's the direction.Who cares? The point is, the movie is thoroughly unconvincing.The plot is basically a "Halloween" rip off, but it's told so badly you could miss that. It's about a girl who is in college and has a mental block about something in her past involving a man who breaks out of a mental institution at the beginning of the movie. He does this so easily you wonder why they even bother showing it. Why not just start with him out, and leave the escape up to our imagination? Anyway the movie tries to build suspense for his arrival home and the imminent and titular "massacre" with an endless barrage of tedious and inept dream sequences. These fantasies just become distancing when they are supposed to be horrifying. Furthermore, the actress who plays the protagonist is unable to make her "character" interesting enough to even want to get into her head. We know that she's related to the killer and that he's coming back to get his revenge. We didn't need so many interminable dream sequences to point that out. You get it almost immediately.It's funny that "Halloween" had a lower budget than this, and that was able to establish some key details with ease, like Laurie Strode as a fully fledged character, and Michael Myers as a terrifying embodiment of evil. This movie completely fails at establishing anything like that.According to the IMDb plot description, what sets off the protagonist of "Sorority House Massacre" remembering her evil brother, and what makes him come back to take revenge (or whatever you call what he is doing), is the fact that the titular "sorority house" is the same house that they grew up in, where he first went on a killing spree. I missed that detail in the movie, but if it's really true, it's the dumbest thing about this whole debacle.
Leofwine_draca
This tiresome slasher yarn is lacking in wit, sophistication, originality, action or quality; all of the reasons you would want to watch a movie in the first place. Why did I decide to rent this film in the first place if it was so bad, you may ask. Well firstly the box art - many a time I have been suckered into seeing a film because of the cool box art. Secondly, I found this on the Medusa label, and there used to be a lot of interesting films on that label. Sadly this is not one of them. The best thing about the movie is the title, although sadly there isn't a "massacre" of any sort really.Sure enough, the film opens with lots of p.o.v. camera-work and tinkly music. The plot in a nutshell is that teens are terrorised at night by a killer who has escaped from an asylum and turns out to be the brother of the lead. I'm surprised Moustapha Akkad didn't sue the makers of this HALLOWEEN rip-off. Then again as Roger Corman is behind this movie nothing would surprise me. What happened to that guy anyway? He started off by paving the way for the genres with his enjoyable B-movies of the late '50s, and has ended up producing all sorts of rubbish in his later years. The film is very cheap-looking, and in particular has some really bad sets which just look plain wrong. The most imagination is summoned in a dream sequence in which the lead discovers a load of weird life like dolls sitting around a dinner table, but that's it. Otherwise its business as usual with lots of irritating teens talking, messing around, and a bad guy picking them off one by one (in the last twenty minutes that is).Watching a film in which teenage girls talk about the reasons for their hairstyles and try on various items of hideous '80s clothing isn't my ideal choice for an evening's entertainment, although the latter event is merely a gratuitous opportunity to throw in some extra nudity from the girls. With Roger Corman I wasn't surprised, although a scene later on in the film with a nude man was pretty shocking. The acting is awful, the cast bland and wooden, but that doesn't matter anyway as the script is rubbish to begin with. In an asylum scene one of the orderlies has some funny lines but that's about as unintentionally funny as the script gets and only provides a few chuckles here and there.What else is there of note? In one scene characters watch HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP on television, another Corman reference and the film's nicest surprise. Is it scary? Nope, because the killer is just an ordinary Joe who you've passed on the street a million times. He becomes indestructible at the end of the film, but that just serves to drag out the running time even more, so that the last ten minutes drags like two hours. Watch out for a hilarious moment where the killer dives in through a window. On the first floor. Is he pals with Superman or something? So, in the end, SORORITY HOUSE MASSACRE is the bane of American '80s cinema, and a fine example of the trash that the slasher genre spawned. There isn't even the saving benefit of any gore for the horror fans, as the oh-so-imaginative killings are reduced to repeated non-bloody stabbings. This is a film ridden with annoying flashbacks, silly slow-motion dream sequences and false scares, and isn't to be recommended to your worst enemy. It's not even funny-bad. It's just boring.
loomis78-815-989034
Beth (O'Neill) visits her new sorority house and gets a familiar and scary vibe from it. When she was very young it was her family's house. Her older brother Bobby (Russell) murdered her entire family and was put away in a mental home leaving her as the only survivor. No, it's not Halloween time, but the maniac escapes and goes back home to kill his remaining sister and any nubile Sorority girl who gets in his way. Borrowing heavily from John Carpenter's "Halloween", delivers mostly what you expect a slasher movie with some Elm St. dream sequences for good measure. To be fair, the movie is at least competently made and first time Director Carol Frank manages some decent moments of suspense and some old fashioned stalk and slash. The movie is ripping off everything it can but manages to be entertaining in a cheap way. Relatively bloodless, this movie delivers a few nasty knifing s but no new ground is broken. Slasher fans might enjoy a cheap thrill from this one.
Scott LeBrun
"Sorority House Massacre" does have some things going for it, although in the end it doesn't stand out from other slasher offerings during this time. (Not that some aficionados of the genre should mind all that much.) It's got blood, and it's got some breast shots, but it might not be exploitative enough to suit some tastes. What it does have is some good atmosphere, and occasionally it's slicker than expected, with a particularly tense scene involving a ladder. The nightmare sequences are reasonably well realized, and the girls in the story are not quite your typical slasher movie airheads. That doesn't mean that the dialogue isn't groan inducing at times, or that its delivery is any better. Still, when we watch something like this we come to expect a degree of crudeness and cheesiness, and this movie does succeed in that regard; it's even got a requisite dopey 80s style montage.Troubled girl Beth (Angela O'Neill) comes to visit her friends at a sorority house, while being plagued by visions of a stone faced psychotic creep, Bobby (John C. Russell), who'd murdered his family and has been locked up in a mental hospital. Naturally, the creep escapes, and Beth and her friends (and their boyfriends) will eventually be terrorized and slaughtered.There are enough amusing, titillating, and suspenseful moments to make this palatable viewing. Writer / director Carol Frank, in her only feature credit, does keep the story moving, and like so much of the Concorde catalogue, it clocks in at a very trim running time, in this case 74 minutes. The music by Michael Wetherwax is quite good and there are some efficient "prowling camera" sequences.If one simply can't get enough of this sort of thing, they could do worse than "Sorority House Massacre".Six out of 10.