Most horror fans are quick to write off Hollywood films nowadays, as it’s become chock-full of CW cast members looking to make a quick buck in the off season in neutered horror where we get no gore, no nudity and, sadly, no fun.  Watching the trailer for Sorority Row, it’s easy to write it off as another lame PG-13 snore fest, not worth the $5 matinee price.

Watching a trailer like that, it’s easy to remember the recent remake of Black Christmas, the mean-spirited film that piled on the gore and lost much of the charm and dread of the original film.  Still, it was filled with pretty ladies!  Just like Sorority Row.  However, whereas Black Christmas lost so much of its fun and humor in bleakness and mean-spiritedness, Sorority Row manages to have an old-school fun horror film sensibility.  It won’t win any awards for it’s originality, or hell, even for anything, but it does manage to be a pretty decent horror flick overall.

Full review after the jump!

sorority row
Makes you want to go back to college, doesn't it?

In Sorority Row, a prank goes very, very wrong.  A college kid cheats on a girl, and her sorority sisters come up with a way to get him back – by faking his girlfriend’s death.  Who the hell does that kind of stuff?  Well, apparently the girls of Theta Pi do!  While trying to mess with this guy though, they make a mistake – in order to hide the body, the girls say that they need to release the air from the dead girl’s (well, fake dead girl) lungs.  While they pretend to look for sharp rocks, the guy grabs a tire iron from the trunk and, to release the air from the lungs, jabs it into the girl, really killing her!  Well, damn…what to do now? The chick really is dead!

Well, why not really bury her body in the mine shaft, then?  They all do, and promise never to speak of it again.  Until graduation, that is, where the tension in the group has reached a point that many don’t even speak to each other anymore, which is only made worse when all of the girls receive a picture mail on their phone of the bloody tire iron.  Who told the secret?  Or, has the worst happen, and dead girl really wasn’t dead?

The film obviously owes much of it’s premise to I Know What You Did Last Summer, and even a bit to the aforementioned Black ChristmasSorority Row knows what kind of film it is, and manages to have fun with it.  Characters joke about being “the next to die,” there is plenty of humor in the dialogue, and there are plenty of decent decent scares for horror fans.

The kills get a little redundant after a while (the tire iron makes for a decent weapon, but there are only one or two non-tire iron kills), and the film really does seem as if it was originally intended to be PG-13, with the R-rating added later in reshoots that added some more gore, but overall horror fans looking for a good time should check it out.

Plus, it’s got Briana Evigan, daughter of TekWar’s Greg Evigan.

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Do you need another reason?

Paul Awesomeness Score - 6Paul’s Awesomeness Score – 6 out of 10!

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