Sorority House Massacre (1986)

The start of what is considered the cousin film trilogy to Slumber Party Massacre, despite sharing no story nor actors nor directors nor writers nor producers. But they both have young women in their underwear getting killed, so it's something. This one clearly had a much larger budget, and is a real slasher flick instead of some half-assed semi-comedy.

It opens with Phantasm music and titles over a steady shot of a house at night, which is a reasonable way to start anything. Then it tries to setup a flashback-based story by interviewing our hospitalized future main-girl about her past sorority adventures. The organ-and-xylophone Phantasm music maintains, and is the best part, thanks to the guy who would go on to give us the soundtracks for Puppet Master 5 and Pumpkinhead II. It cuts wildly between disjoint scenes of what is either parallel characters or memories or the future. It's going for non-linear narrative, but doesn't have the editing chops to pull it off.

Some hallucinated yard children warn her not to enter the sorority house that she was just inside of in the last scene, but she does enter it, and now it's full of candles and creepy dolls having a dinner party. Main girl walks around slowly and silently while suspenseful ambient noise drones. Blood drips from things. It might not have characters or plot yet, but it has infinitely more horror movie than any of the Slumber Party films ever achieved. She hallucinates about a guy with a bowie knife.

The 20-going-on-60 sorority girls dress like middle-aged, corporate secretaries and their house looks like it was decorated by a grandmother. The voice track is muffled, so you have to crank it up to hear the boring dialogue. A university professor meta-referentially teaches the kids about foreshadowing, while the film clumsily fails to execute it properly. Out of nowhere, fake Van Halen knock-off synth music blares, the girls strip naked, and there's a montage of them trying on a bunch of different old lady clothing. This officially ticks the "sorority movie must have naked girls" checkbox, so we can get on with it. Despite the brief nudity, absolutely nothing about this film even slightly approaches sexy. While they try on ugly clothing, a non-vocal mystery man breaks out of an insane asylum and steals a bowie knife from a hardware store.

It has no larger plot or anything useful to say, but it's too early for a slasher chase, so they take turns doing bad jump-scares on each other around the house and telling horror stories, and main-girl-Beth keeps having hallucinations which are also memories and also premonitions. They find a bowie knife hidden in the fireplace by the previous murdery resident. It's still too early, so they blather idly and waste time until the escaped mental patient finally arrives to pick them off one-by-one.

It's not the worst slasher chase in history, successfully filmed in very low light throughout, but it doesn't have anything to offer more than the standard chase-kill-chase-kill-chase-kill cycle. Beth uneventfully wins, and it ends on one last disappointing attempt at a jump-scare. They forgot that the first scene set up the film as a flashback story, and didn't close out the flashback. Lively Phantasm music plays over the credits.