imdb synopsis: College juniors Cassidy, Jessica, Claire, Ellie, and Megan are sorority sisters sworn to trust, secrecy and solidarity, no matter what. But their loyalty is tested when a prank at a raucous house party goes terribly wrong and Megan ends up brutally murdered. Rather than confess to the crime and risk destroying their bright futures, the girls agree to hide the bloody corpse and keep their secret forever.
And then they all get stalked by some mysterious killer in a hood (Scream) who knows their secret and sends them videos and pictures of their secret (I Know What You Did Last Summer and I Still Know What You Did Last Summer and … is there another one)?
What the hell? I realize this is a remake of the 1983 film The House on Sorority Row, but does every misogynistic horror film from 1983 really need a remake? Here’s what I’m betting on: gratuitous nudity, possibly in hot tubs, girl-on-girl hate, or, you know, murder. I’ll just stop there.
Look, let me be the first to admit that I don’t exactly have a high opinion of most sororities in general, especially given many of their well-known hazing techniques (body-shaming one another by circling “problem areas” in marker, etc). But this film will most certainly take on a they-all-deserve-to-die theme, with the audience identifying exclusively with the killer, as the killer picks off the girls in one hilarious bloodbath after another.
While a film like Mean Girls tries to take a decidedly feminist slant in the end, at least in the way it addresses the issue of female competition for men, female slut-shaming, and the subsequent abandonment of sisterhood (I have some problems with this film, but that’s for another post), a film like Sorority Row promises to use the idea of sisterhood as some kind of commentary on … what? Female incompetence?
Face it, when women get together man, I mean, watch the fuck out! You might, like, die!
Of course, we can’t ignore Carol J. Clover’s “Final Girl” theory. She argues in her book Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, that slasher films are obsessed with feminism in that they force male viewers to identify with the Final Girl, the one lone girl who doesn’t die, who gets her shit together, who kills the killer.
And all the men in the audience cheer!
I get that. And I like her theory. But I don’t have high hopes for this particular film to live up to her theory. As I said above, when these girls do a stupid, shitty thing, and one of their sorority sisters dies as a result, I suspect that a major element of you-deserve-what-you-get-haha-bitches will overtake any potential empowering “Final Girl” resolution. I hope I’m wrong.