Sorority Row

If you want to know what's wrong with Sorority Row, look no further than the short DVD documentary "Killer 101," in which director Stewart Hendler and writers Josh Stolberg and Peter Goldfinger explain the template of a traditional slasher film. "It's predominately young people; they always are set at a school ― a boarding school," says Goldfinger. "You start off with a whole group of people and one by one they are chopped and hacked and killed until you basically got one or two people left standing," says Stolberg. "Almost always the last survivor in these movies is a girl," explains Hendler. These are but a few of the many, many clichés the three men proudly follow, and it becomes painfully clear that they weren't interested in making a transcendent, or even particularly good, example of the slasher subgenre, but rather a typical one. Closely following the I Know What You Did Last Summer template, Sorority Row follows six sorority sisters as they hide the aftermath of a prank that left a fellow sister dead. One year later, a mysterious killer begins targeting everyone involved, and if you have any doubt which of the sisters will live or die, well, you've never seen a slasher film. The sisters are each given token characteristic ― there's the slutty one, the smart one (she has glasses), the, uh, Asian one ― but damned if I could tell any of them apart, and with such sketchy characters thrown into such a run-of-the-mill story, absolutely no tension or suspense is generated. So generic it melts from memory the minute it's over, Sorority Row is no better or worse than an average entry in the Friday the 13th series. So, in other words, it's really bad. Other DVD extras include deleted scenes, outtakes and "Sorority Secrets: Stories from the Set," a documentary with interviews with the leading ladies. It's fluffy stuff, but I did appreciate when one of the actresses, observing the high number of mouth-stabbing deaths, suggested, "There's an oral fixation with the writers."