Welcome, dear reader, to the latest edition of The TRAPPO Town Gazette! I’m Dustin, and I write this weekly newsletter, in case you didn’t know. It’s October, which is officially the most wonderful time of the year in our neck of the woods. Don’t you just love it? It’s the only time when some well adjusted individual can festoon their front yard with a bunch of skeletons and blood-soaked body parts without their neighbors calling the police, and that’s pretty cool. There are plenty of spooky surprises around the corner here in TRAPPO Town, so stay tuned for all of that good stuff. In the meantime, let’s check out a goofy horror movie!
Sorority House Massacre (1986)
IMDb logline: A female college student who recently moved into a sorority is hunted by an escaped psychotic killer who shares a strange telepathic link with her.
SPOILER ALERT!
Sorority House Massacre was financed and released by the legendary Roger Corman through his New Concorde Studios in 1986, based on the success of 1982’s slasher Slumber Party Massacre, and this film’s writer and director, Carol Frank, served as assistant to director Amy Jones on that production. Like Slumber Party Massacre, this film spawned a pair of sequels that many slasher aficionados claim to be more entertaining than the original.
What’s the plot? A confused-looking girl named Beth (Angela O’Neill) with a hairstyle apparently inspired by Bob Saget's coif in Full House shows up at her new sorority, dressed in a goofy flannel top and pajama pants. So at least she’s dressed comfortably.
Beth’s personality appears to be missing, but nobody ever seems to notice this. But get this: the sorority house she's just moved into is also coincidentally the house she once lived in as a small child. One fateful night, her brother Bobby (who must be related to Beth, because he's just as empty-eyed and dull) just arbitrarily decided it was time to brutally murder his entire family, and only Beth managed to escape with her life.
And much like Daphne Zuniga's character in 1984’s The Initiation, Beth has conveniently repressed all of this useful information, which I assume is supposed to add some kind of mystery to the narrative, but since almost any “spoiler free” plot synopsis you’ll find online just tosses this information out, there’s really no mystery left for the viewer to attempt to figure out while watching this movie. I found myself largely unengaged by the plot during Sorority House Massacre's brief hour and fourteen minute run-time, feeling like it had very little meat on its bloody bones.
In an effort to add… something to the threadbare narrative, the movie shoves in some bullshit pseudo-science early on about how family members often have a psychic link, explaining how Bobby breaks out of the loony bin the exact moment Beth crosses the threshold of the sorority house, like she just activated some supernatural tripwire. From this point forward, Beth is frequently assaulted by enigmatic visions of her tormented past, being stalked by the laziest-looking psycho killer I may have ever seen in a motion picture of this ilk. Seriously, the way he raises his hunting knife in a "threatening manner" just looks like he's tiredly reaching for a light switch in the middle of the night, completely neglecting to appear dangerous or unhinged in any way.
And this guy's face is just so boring that I could never see him as a credible threat. Maybe that was the point the writer/director Carol Frank was trying to make, illustrating the banality of evil, but it doesn’t matter if the viewer can’t connect with the material. The actor who played Bobby, the late John C. Russell, has no other acting credits listed on IMDb, so maybe he never had any great passion for the craft and decided to walk away from the industry after sleepwalking through Sorority House Massacre. I don't care either way. Was this film trying to create a new Michael Myers with this killer? If so, then they unfortunately failed.
Hang on a moment…
Michael Myers didn't return to the big screen until Halloween IV: The Return Of Michael Myers in 1988, two years after Sorority House Massacre was released. And this movie is also about a psychotic killer who attempts to wipe out his entire family, always returning to kill the ones who previously escaped his wrath, which is what the Halloween franchise became starting with the second chapter. And Halloween V: The Revenge Of Michael Myers features a family member (Danielle Harris' Jamie Lloyd, being Michael's niece) with a strange psychic link to the killer. Did the Halloween franchise rip off Sorority House Massacre?
It’s something to think about, I guess.
I will give the movie credit for blatantly calling out the "knife-as-phallic symbol" trope of the slasher sub-genre in a scene where Beth's sorority sisters attempt to decipher the meaning behind her blood-soaked dreams. I appreciated that quite a bit. I also appreciated the often moody and engaging cinematography from the late Marc Reshovsky, a veteran music video cinematographer who also memorably lensed 1996’s Set It Off. And despite the film’s cast of winsome coeds existing primarily to be knocked off one by one, they’re all given a few memorable lines and broad character traits that prevent them from feeling disposable. Despite the film’s flaws, it’s clear that Carol Frank was treating this production seriously, and it’s just a shame that this is the only feature she ever wrote or directed, because she demonstrated some genuine talent with Sorority House Massacre.
Unfortunately, all of the promise on display is quickly forgotten when character after character just gets lazily stabbed to death by a half-asleep madman, and that’s a problem. Everybody in the movie dies because nobody can make a single good decision. Just keep hitting this beefy prick with a shovel until his head collapses like a soufflé! Don't stop because you just assume two medium blows to his back have killed him! Keep swinging!
You'd think these nimrods have never seen a slasher flick before.
In Other News…
This Friday is the season four premiere of TRAPPO. That’s the podcast we make, the whole reason why this newsletter exists. Our season premieres are traditionally dedicated to our “essential albums” format, wherein we each choose a series of albums that we find… essential… and induct them into the TRAPPO Essentials Can(n)on. This year, we each chose six albums to induct, and you can find out what they are by listening to the episode when it goes live on Friday. You can CLICK HERE to check us out on Spotify For Podcasters, or find TRAPPO wherever you listen to your podcasts, because we’re probably there, too.
That’s it for this week. If you can’t get enough TRAPPO, you can follow us on Threads or visit our official blog and leave some comments, suggestions or queries. Until next time, dear reader…