Touches You

Sorry, this movie sucks

Just perfect...

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

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.

"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.

Not to be confused with the earlier and slightly better The Slumber Party Massacre, with which it shares several similarities (a house full of teenage girls, a psycho killer, a virginal heroine, the word 'Massacre' in its title), Sorority House Massacre is yet another routine 80s stalk 'n' slash thriller, with a little Nightmare on Elm Street dream nonsense thrown in to try and spice things up a little.It doesn't work!.When the most horrific thing in a scary movie is the awful fashion sense of its characters, then you know you've picked a real turkey; admittedly, the extra large shoulder pads, baggy checked trousers with extremely high waist, and nasty perms are all fairly amusing, but they do not make up for this film's inability to scare, its lack of gore, or the complete absence of a decent plot.The derivative story sees Angela O'Neill as Beth, the new member of a sorority house where it is rumoured that a lunatic once murdered his entire family. This being a cheesy 80s slasher flick, those rumours eventually prove to be true—well... almost: Beth turns out to be the only survivor of the massacre, now all grown up and lacking any memory of her childhood trauma. Worse still, her brother—the killer—now seems to have a psychic connection with Beth, knows that his lil' sis is back 'home', and wants to finish the job he started 14 years ago. Escaping from his asylum with ease, he makes a quick stop at a store to pick up a hunting knife, and then hot foots it to the sorority house, where he begins to hack up the girls (and their boyfriends, who, this being a cheesy 80s slasher flick, drop by to party).Taking an absolute age to get going, with far too much time spent on mundane chit-chat between the girls, and on Beth's dreary nightmares (caused by her psychic 'link' with her brother), this film has a real problem with its pacing. A little welcome nudity helps a tad to keep viewers from nodding off completely (although none of the girls could really be classed as total babes, they do have nice jugs), but it's left way too late before big bro' finally gets into full-on killing mode. The deaths, when they do arrive, are uninspired, consisting of one tedious, unconvincing stabbing after another, leaving one longing for something a little more creative (is it too much to ask for our killer to make an effort?).By 1986, absolutely tons of slasher movies had already been and gone; this one added nothing new to the genre, whilst making a complete hash out of the stale elements it borrowed from its predecessors.

"Sorority House Massacre" is a really troubled slasher with a few good areas.**SPOILERS**Visiting some friends, Beth, (Angela O'Neill) finds that Linda, (Wendy Martel) Sara, (Pamela Ross) and Tracy, (Nicole Rio) are moving into a sorority. When they get settled in, she begins to start having weird visions and dreams of a psychotic figure threatening and torturing her. As the others laugh it off to her new surroundings, they invite their boyfriends Craig, (Joe Nassi) Andy, (Marcus Vaughter) and John, (Vinnie Bilancio) over to help them with a special school project they've signed up for. As night falls, they suddenly start to disappear around the house, and it soon becomes apparent that a serial killer has been stalking the group, and that a deadly secret from the past has allowed for him to select the location, forcing them all to run for safety.The Good News: This here wasn't that great, and only had a couple of good points. One of the main ones is that, when it finally gets slash-happy at the end, it's entirely watchable. There's a large amount of stalking and chasing, which are the strong points. The chase across the house reveals plenty to work with, from the attack in the bedroom to the frantic search through the living room and kitchen being the big ones. There's even some good moments from the end of the backyard encounter all the way to the pretty creepy basement encounter that brings up the whole plot in great detail that makes it seem like it's new and different when it's really not are some of the best points drug up during these moments. The house itself is fairly inventive and allows for some really nice scenes to come about through the placing of the action. The only other point of note is one really cheesy scene where a couple are making out inside a tent outside the house. The girl gets killed so the guy, butt-naked, wearing nothing but trainers runs into the house and begins spouting one of the most hilarious lines ever. It's quite cheesy, and really applies in the situation, making it all the better to appear in such a cheesy film. Otherwise, that's all the film has going for it.The Bad News: This one actually has a couple of pretty big flaws. One of them is just that very little actually happens for the first three quarters of the film, and then most of the kills are crammed into the final quarter. For the rest of the film we're given plenty of uninteresting scenes of girls talking, girls dressing up in each other's clothes, some more girls talking and some guys talking to the girls, resulting in a film that is quite boring for most of the time. These belong elsewhere, least of all in a slasher film, and they're so aggravating and unimportant to the film that even appearing in the film results in a film with an incredibly slow build-up for no point and makes for a really dull period. These should've been trimmed down and made even less significant than what they really are. Even worse, there's a couple of problems with the ending. When the psycho finally turns up at the house, the so-called massacre is nothing more than a series of below-average kills done very quickly, all with the same pitiful knife. There is very little blood involved and there is no creativity to the killing, making the killer as boring and unimaginative as the kills, which is pretty hard to achieve. The last big flaw is the incredibly clichéd appearance of so many different parts of the film. The opening is a direct rip-off from a very famous slasher, the not-so-shocking twist revealed at the end is cribbed directly from the particular film's sequel, and as a whole it feels very much a retread. Overall, it's a really lower slasher.The Final Verdict: With more problems than good points, this one falls down the rung of the slasher genre and as a whole is really underwhelming. Check it out for hardcore slasher fanatics only, or are in the mood for cheesy fun, otherwise there's far better ones out there more deserving.Rated R: Violence, Nudity, Language and a mild sex scene