The House on Sorority Row on DVD, Horror, Kate McNeil, Eileen Davidson

A group of girls staying at a sorority house clash with the house’s owner, who wants them out. They decide to play a prank on her, but it goes awry and she winds up dead. Panicking, the girls try to hide the body, but someone (or something) witnessed the crime and begins to stalk them.

A nifty little early 80’s college-set slasher flick

The House on Sorority Row, The seven lady members of the Theta Pi Sorority accidentally kill their overbearing shrew of a house mother Ms. Slater (a memorably huffy Lois Kelsa Hunt) and try to dispose of her body by hiding it in a filthy old pool. Unbeknownst to the girls, Ms. Slater has a hideously malformed son named Erik (the creepy Charles Serio) who doesn’t take the news of his mother’s untimely death too well. In fact, Erik proceeds to exact a harsh and bloody revenge on the girls by bumping them off in assorted gruesome ways. While it’s admittedly routinely plotted and predictable, this cool little slasher feature still makes the cut thanks to Mark Rosman’s stylish and assured direction, a respectable body count of nine, several gory kill scenes (said murders include an iron rod in the torso, a steak knife in the neck, and a cane whacking to the head), sound acting from a capable cast, Richard Band’s splendidly eerie and elegant orchestral score, a smidgen of gratuitous nudity (the luscious blonde looker Eileen Davidson is notable in this department as the slutty Vicki), a reasonable amount of tension, Timothy Suhrstedt’s lush, handsome cinematography, and a few inventive oddball touches (a severed head in the toilet, the heroine confronting the killer while tripping on hallucinogenic drugs). Moreover, this film warrants extra praise for departing from the slasher norm by not presenting the main female characters as your usual innocent lambs brought to the slaughter; instead these gals bring what happens upon themselves. Above average of its type and well worth checking out for fans of 80’s slice’n’dice low-budget horror flicks.