Customer Reviews

Sorority House Massacre [VHS]

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is one of those ALMOST HAD IT movies... SORORITY HOUSE MASSACRE is clearly an attempt by Concorde (Roger Corman's company) to cash in on the success of their SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE series and the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET franchise. Director Carol Frank (who worked on the original SLUMBER)does an admirable job at creating some suspense and giving the movie an eerie, creepy aura. Using haunting images of blood soaked, faceless dolls at dinner tables, blood dripping from the ceiling, broken marbles crashing and rolling across the floor in slow motion... Frank proves she has talent and had a vision of wanting to create something more than the average slasher film. Unfortunately, she just barely misses it by throwing in too common of a plot device (escaped mental patient returns home)and stopping the story for another 80's plot device (girls getting naked for no legitimate reason). It takes away the potential class this movies strives to offer. All in all, though, it's a frequently creepy and occasionally scary little movie which I WOULD recommend to slasher movie buffs. The campy sequel is another story....

I didn't know what I would expect from this low budget 80's slasher...I thought it would be a bunch of college chicks getting naked and being murdered...for the most part it was, but there was also some plot to it, and a very freaky killer...much more interesting, and better than than its predessesor Slumber Party Massacre...a great film for a late night gathering...

The gore effects are great for such a low budjet movie. It is about a young man who slaughters his family with a hunting knife but the youngest girl survives. Years later the house becomes a sorority house and the young girl (now a woman)goes to visit her friends at the house and she doesn't remember what happened but she begins having nightmares about what happened and her psycho brother with psychic abilities realizes she is there than he escapes and comes to the house and makes the massacre again. DON'T CONSIDER THIS A SLEAZE MOVIE BECAUSE IT IS NOT ! I strongly reccomend this film to every dedicated slasher fan who will take this classic for what it is.

This movie is a farily typical slasher/late teen girl movie for the most part, but I think the director went a little overboard trying to give it a plot and depth. Rather than having the usual scantily clad women running around with a killer who showed up for no particular reason (see Sorority House Massacre 2 for that), this one tries to tie everything together in a thriller-like fashion. I am not sure the skills of any of the involved parties were really up to the task. Overall it is still an enjoyable movie. There is plenty of slashing and scantily cladness, and if you tune out the plot it is good mindless fun.

This movie was great, but its sequel Sorority House Massacre 2: Nighty Nightmare was better! Anyway, this high-quality DVD is great for anyone to watch! You can watch the scenes with ORVUL over and over again! YAY! SHM 4Life!

This one was a staple of the horror sections in video stores back in the '80s and '90s, and one of the few of its type that I never saw -- the cover makes it look like Troma Z-Grade T&A, which I usually avoid, but Netflix mailed it to me last year by mistake. Despite my utter annoyance, I didn't have anything better to do, so I watched it.

The story is a routine rip from both HALLOWEEN (psycho escapes from asylum and starts killing teens) and ELM STREET (bizarre nightmares of the killer), but it's surprisingly well executed. There's some really good cinematography, some genuinely cool scare/dream sequences, and a complimentary musical score. Of course, there's some obligatory bad acting, a pointless montage that exists solely for gratuitous nudity purposes ("let's get naked and try on our best friend's clothes while she's not home!") and some other typical '80s idiocy. But all in all for its genre, there's a whole lot worse out there.

In the 80's slasher movies were it. However, women we're often portrayed as just sex objects, so the women's rights activitists had to put a stop to that. (That's something I could never figure out because in almost every 80's movie, the hero of the film was a woman). So a few women wrote some slasher movies with pretty obvious I am woman, hear me roar themes in them. The most obvious being slumber party massacre one, with the drill as a "symbol" for something else. However, I always found these movies to be pretty decent, and soroity house massacre is one of them.

The first thing I always look for in a horror movie is, is the movie well made, and is the acting believable? Where this movie faulters, is in the well made catergory. Some parts of it, the music is really hokey, the camera work is pretty poor and it seems like some of the times the director just didn't care about continuity. (there's a guy running naked, and then in the next scene he's in underware). It's just little things you notice that make the movie seem cheap. The acting is pretty good, no real complaints here.

The next thing I look for are the death sequences. Are they cool and do they make sense? I thought this is where this movie really kicked butt. I think the scene where she is in the dining room and the blood starts running down the walls was pretty neat. The death sequences were pretty cool, and there was some definate tension that you could feel which kept me looking behind me for most of the movie.

The last thing I look for is, does the ending wrap up the movie? In this case, it does. The ending is pretty intense and clears everything up for you. Many people compare this movie to Halloween, and there are some definite similarities here. The formula is the same, but for what horror movie aren't they the same?

This movie is a pretty good movie, that could have really been a great movie. It's a shame it is made so poorly in some parts, because it really detracts from the rest of the movie. That's why I gave it three stars, instead of five. It really had potential, and some parts really had me creeped out. However, I'd definitely recommend seeing the movie once, and it might be worth you buying it. It's kindof an embarrassing movie to buy though, because everyone thinks its an erotic film ;)

The 80's saw a whole lot of massacring in terms of young, comely co-eds in film as Roger Corman, with his New Concorde film group cashed in on the phenomena known as the slasher flick. Often times he's credited as a trendsetter, and that's partially true as he was the first to introduce the biker flicks of the late 60's with The Wild Angels (1966) and brought psychedelic imagery to the mainstream with The Trip (1967), but it seemed more often than not his features `rode the wave', copying better, previously released, popular films at a very low cost in an effort to make some easy dough off an currently established genre or motif. This was especially true, in my opinion, of his latter projects with Concorde. Is there anything wrong with that? Certainly not, but the results tended to be less than spectacular, as is the case with Sorority House Massacre (1987). Written and directed by Carol Frank, whose previous credits include being an assistant to the director of the film The Slumber Party Massacre (1982) - keep in mind I said assistant to the director, not assistant director -, Sorority House Massacre stars Angela O'Neill (Alien Nation), whose since found a career behind the scenes as a property master, Nicole Rio (who could forget her role in 1987's Terminal Exposure as `Hostage Girl'?), and a bunch of other people you've never heard of...

The film begins with some especially cheap looking titles, followed by a young woman, who we later come to know as Beth (O'Neill), approaching a sorority house. Seems she visiting some friends for the weekend, and they're planning a party of sorts. As Beth enters the house, she starts having strange images flash through her mind, which we'll see more of later. These scenes are intercut with scenes of a mental patient having a spastic attack in a local, state run facility for the deranged and unhinged. With a majority of the sorority members gone, this leaves four girls (I use the term `girls' loosely as they all appear to be in their mid-20's), including Beth, to go through the rich girls closet (she also left), and allow for the audience to see much boobery as they try one her clothes. Anyway, the mental guy escapes (partially due to the most lax security I've ever seen in a mental institution), and some guys show up at the sorority house, friends of the girls. Here's where we learn from one of the guys (of course he would know all about it, only for the fact that it's in the script) that the house has a past, one involving a series of murders before it became a sorority house. Beth keeps having strange visions of the house and past incidents, indicating she may have some involvement with these past events, and hypnosis (one of the girls is a psych major, of course, so she knows how to hypnotize people) reveals a bit more. Soon the escaped loony man shows up and initiates a `depopulation' program at the house, picking off those in attendance one by one...who will be left standing by the end of the film (you probably won't care much)? And what's the connection between the killer, the house, and Beth (if you can't figure it out in the first 20 minutes, you need to get out more)?

I didn't think this was going to be great, but then again I didn't think it was going to be as craptacular as it was...the dialog was rancid, the acting extremely poor (there's virtually no emotion towards the recent and continuing deaths of their friends), hardly any tension, and what has to be one of the most annoying music scores for a film I've heard in a long time. Nearly all the scares stemmed from the characters within the group walking up behind each other and scaring (oh, but not on purpose) the unsuspecting individual, although it was satisfying to see one guy, Craig, get kneed in the crotch by his girlfriend. And speaking of the character of Craig, I have to say he was a real winner...here his girlfriend is getting slaughtered by a killer and he just runs away. He didn't even lift a finger to help her, and he certainly could have...oh well, such acts of cowardice will not go unpunished. I think my favorite line of dialog was when Beth was talking about her dreams and she states, `I don't get it. Something really awful must be going on in my head!'...yeah, in your head, and in this movie...I think the thing that annoyed me the most about this film was it was just so predictable, and there seemed little effort to make it anything more than what it was...the killer's identity is revealed early on, along with the connections between him, the house, and Beth, so what's left? Nothing...it's like riding a roller coaster with the big thrill being at the very beginning, and then the rest of the ride being really tame (except this was more like one of those kiddie coasters that rides about two feet off the ground). I will say the best thing about the film, beside the various T & A shots (mostly T, but not a lot of A), was the fact it had a running time of about 1 hour and 13 minutes. I suppose picking at this film is like flogging a dead horse, but, as I mentioned earlier, if I thought any real effort to try and churn something relatively decent out had been made, I would have been less inclined to trash on it so...

The full screen picture on this DVD does look pretty good, even if the film itself stinks. Also, the 2 channel stereo audio is decent. There are a couple of extras including cast bios, an original trailer (which has Spanish subtitles for some reason), along with trailers for Seduction of Innocence (1996), Emmanuelle: First Contact (2000), and The Slumber Party Massacre (1982). This film was followed by Sorority House Massacre II (1990), which appear to have been done in a campier vein.

Cookieman108

By the way, the killing scenes weren't very good, either...and if you want to know the body count, I figured it to be around 9 or so...

A former murderer escapes from a mental institution, and stalks teenage girls. This could outline "Halloween", "Slumber Party Massacre", or "Soroity House Massacre". All of these films share similarities. Aside from tbe films un-originality, it's not completely bad. I got this expecting to see a very cheesy movie, after seeing the even cheesier "Sorority House Massacre" 2 & 3 movies before; actually, this is the least cheesiest of the series, besides the extra speical, ten-minute "dress-up" montage. It also goes by alot faster than the first installment in it's sister-series, the slumber party movies, although it's only shorter by two minutes (it's 75 minutes all together); it goes by like that <snap!>. It also lacks the scares and suspense of the first "Slumber Party Massacre" movie. What it lacks in scares, however, it makes up in good production values. The acting is not completely bad, and the conversation scripture is every bit as good as that of "Halloween". The dream sequence in the begining is pretty neat. But, altogether it's not exactly a great scary movie, not even for an 80's slasher pic. I can only reluctantly reccomend it, but suggest seeing the much more supierior "House on Sorority Row" instead...

This is one of the many low- budget slasher flicks I saw probably back in high school that i forgot about , but having seen it a few times I have included it in my collection of favorite slasher movies. I agree that originality is not what the makers of this film had in mind ,and the plot centers on a girl in her mid teens named Beth who went by the name Laura back in her childhood who is now living in a sorority house with several other females and having nightmares about a man who was her brother that murdered her family, and she was the only survivor who managed to escape in a small opening in the house where he tried to get to her , but than buried the knife in a fireplace before police finally came. Now, some 13-14 years later her brother is starting to sense her presence in the house and having spastic fits manages to assault a staff member in the mental institution and escapes to come for her. Throughout the movie there were some influences of both HALLOWEEN/ THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE , so I could understand the reviewers crying halloween ripoff while viewing this movie , but most slashers never really are original and this is worth adding to a collection of slashers.