The House on Sorority Row
On December 17, 1979, a thirty-three year old dead man was taken on a much unexpected and hitherto unparalleled detour from his funeral procession and taken instead on a last-minute debauch. The driver of his hearse was a woman named Karen Greenlee, an unrepentant necrophile subsequently infamous for her mid-procession U-turn and said debauch, which might be the ultimate male fantasy when you get right down to the brass tacks of sexual ego. There were no laws against necrophilia in California at the time – I just bet there are now – and with no Personhood Amendments defining a dead body as a human being, there was no kidnapping, either. She spent 11 days in jail for “stealing” the hearse and “disturbing” the funeral. She has since become the subject of a movie (Kissed) and remains famous for her lack of remorse. I only bring up the Karen Greenlee story because it's the only real-life parallel close enough in absurdity and dark humor to compare with what happens to dead bodies in The House on Sorority Row. (That and I bring up the Karen Greenlee story anytime I can; it always stops whatever conversations-diversions were going on dead in their tracks and gets you everyone's full attention.) Body disposals and legal fall-outs are the most interesting aspects of horror movies. Most horror movies tend to end after the villain-monster is defeated, with no forethought as to what the police are going to make of the crimes and how the case will eventually get closed. It's a common fault of supernatural movies – especially those with possessed people or vampires or werewolves – that even if the heroes survive, they still have to explain why they killed all their friends. It's a bad situation indeed when, after you kill your vampire- demon- werewolf- ex-friend , they are no longer a vampire demon werewolf -friend but simply your old buddy Steve. And the cops are going to want to know why you drove a stake through Steve or shot him with a silver bullet. With slasher movies, body disposal is a tricky business. We expect the slasher to be somewhat competent in hiding his dead bodies. But what if the characters themselves kill someone? Such is the conceit of The House on Sorority Row, a clever little masterpiece from 1982. It revolves around an attempt to dispose of a body that the victims murdered, which the victims continue to dispose of although the disposal itself creates more crimes as the disposal gets more complicated, and that the characters are unaware might not even be the same body they started with and yet go right along disposing of. The movie occurs during the end of the school year and the beginning of summer. Most of the sorority sisters have left for home, but a handful stay to have one last party, and they're introduced during the credits: Katie, Liz, Vicki, Diane, Jeanie, and Morgan. During a tracking shot that shows each of them smiling in their graduation gowns as a photographer takes their picture, Vicki smiles seductively at the photographer and this is the first time I've seen nudity foreshadowed even before I know the character's name. The credits also show a pool, a nasty, scum-ridden pool with a tire in it that will play as important a role in this movie as any of the sisters. Katie explains that the pool is so dirty because the house mother, Mrs. Slater, refuses to clean it because the girls never use it because it's nasty and scum-ridden and has a tire in it. Vicky is already up to trouble in the next scene, where she takes a boyfriend to a rickety barn to target practice. She fires at a sack and misses, then breaks free from the hug he was giving her and hits every target with dead accuracy. It must not be a pleasant feeling to know that your hug is the difference between ineptitude and infallibility when it comes to your girlfriend's aim. Next we meet the cast in person as they gather in a circle and drink champagne. One of the sisters makes a toast to reaching her "fullest capacity", a particularly charged phrase in this context when you consider that capacity means "the extent to which something can be filled". This party is interrupted by Mrs. Slater, who tells them with semi-controlled fury that there will be no party at the house the next day. Then Vickie arrives with her boyfriend, Rick. As Vickie and Rick make love on the water bed, Mrs. Slater hears them moaning upstairs and comes down to put a stop to them by sneaking up and gutting the water bed with the sharp edge of her cane. She calls them an assortment of insults as Vicky squirms in the water as if she was a sperm in spermicide. The next day the women gather by the pool, where Vickie loudly complains about "Mrs. Slater and her shit", and since Mrs. Slater has enough bad qualities I'm not surprised that Vickie distinguishes between Mrs. Slater and her shit. She wants to pull an "old-fashioned sorority prank" on Mrs. Slater, and Katie looks worried and morally compromised at the idea. Vickie throws a half-eaten chicken leg in the pool that suggests there is something in it that has to be fed. Later the sisters are decorating the living room, which is apparently going to be the center of one hell of a party, but if they spent half the time cleaning up the pool instead of decorating then that party could have been another hell more. Mrs. Slater shows up and fumes, then Vickie suggests her missing cane is by the pool, which is where she finds it floating on the tire. I'm assuming one of the sisters threw the cane quite nicely on top of the tire and risked missing and sinking it rather than hopping in the pool and placing it there. Vickie tells Mrs. Slater to take a swim, “You like getting people wet, right?”?. She pulls out the gun, and when this only pisses Mrs. Slater off further, she fires a warning shot into a street lamp. The other sisters are unsettled by this, and Vickie accidentally shoots Liz in the ankle during the confusion. With Vickie's Ethical Appeal enhanced by Liz's wound, Mrs. Slater goes in the pool. While she is in there, Vickie shoots her three times, but – alas – the shots were only blanks, and then Mrs. Slater gets out of the pool, armed with her cane and perhaps believing herself immortal, and attacks Vickie. For some reason known only to Vickie, there is a real bullet in the clip that now goes off and kills Mrs. Slater, who falls back into the pool. I suspect that Vickie had fooled the other sisters that all the bullets were blanks, only to put a real bullet in the clip that she intended on killing Mrs. Slater with and thus implicating, incriminating, and recruiting the other girls to help cover up the murder. Katie wants to call an ambulance, but the sister who is going to law school is against this. They decide to dump the body temporarily in the swimming pool until the party is over; they don't cancel the party because they think that would be suspicious – which is perhaps paranoid, but if it isn't, I have to wonder what amateur sleuths they invited and why this prank was a good idea when they knew of them beforehand. The body, however, must eventually be disposed of, probably because a new class of sorority sisters will discover it when they want to swim and thus force the new house mother to clean it, but most obviously because Mrs. Slater cannot be allowed to bloat and float indefinitely as if she fell, drowned and remained – out of strict adherence to her own rules – rotting in the pool, as her corpse has now made the pool so much more unswimable than it ever was before. Later, the party is in full swing. There is a generic 80s band that sounds as if they have discovered how to segue through every Top 40 hit from 1982 in one seamless Wagnerian epic. It is impossible to tell of which three or four songs any given song they perform actually is, which is a pretty gosh darn talented thing to accomplish if you think about it. As people dance and discuss the Greek alphabet a drunk man who has mistakenly grown a mustache wanders off into the woods and is killed by an unseen figure, making it clear that either Mrs. Slater has survived the gun-shot and diphtheria-cholera-gangrenous infection from the pool or that there is another killer afoot. Katie's date Pete arrives and scares the shit out of Vickie, who is as anxious as you would expect her to be although she could just pull a trick out of Bruce Wayne's hat and tell her guests they're all sycophantic lickspittles and watch them clear out. He looks for Katie, who he finds on the balcony crying, a clear indication that she wants to be left alone but the man Vickie hooked her up with is too dense to see this because Vickie is a bitch even incidentally. They all too soon have a bigger problem to deal with, as two boys attempt to throw a screaming woman into the pool. The sisters are quickly on the scene and tell the boys that there is a wet T-shirt contest going on inside, which there isn't and will bring the boys, unhappy and unsatisfied, back with an even more confirmed resolve to throw women in the pool. One of the boys, however, can see inside the house well enough to decide there isn't a wet T-shirt contest and pushes one of the women in. Then the boys run back to the house, although it was just verified that there is no wet T-shirt contest inside and the girl they threw in the pool undoubtedly has one. Stevie remembers the pool lights and worries about them coming on. She goes to the basement to cut the light off and is killed; now there are three bodies the sisters must dispose of. Meanwhile Vickie and Rick dance in the living room to Eye of the Tiger (I love Rock and Roll). Rick asks about his gun, a question that will grow in importance as the sisters diminish in number. Vickie is in an uncomfortable situation: if she tells Rick the truth about the prank, she runs the risk of him ratting on them and thus Rick too must go in the pool; if she doesn't, he might begin to wonder where Mrs. Slater is, figure out that she's dead, and rat on them anyway. Speaking of Mrs. Slater, Pete wonders how Mrs. Slater allowed the sisters to have party of this scope and apparent lack of supervision. This indicates that Mrs. Slater is a house mother of infamy and will certainly be missed if not by the end of the summer then at the start of the next semester. Given Rick's questions about his gun, the pool being a unanticipated attraction, and two more corpses the girls are unware of that ain't going to dispose of themselves, it's delightful that the sisters are forced to party and answer questions about the gun that killed Mrs. Slater as well as Mrs. Slater herself. And to make matters worse, some boys have stripped to their underwear and have gone swimming. The sisters rush to the pool, but there is only one boy in it, and unless she has sunk to bottom, Mrs. Slater is gone. Either the killer has removed her elsewhere – which none of the girls are strong enough to do on her own and thus can't be suspected of – or Mrs. Slater was in fact not dead. Hope is not lost, however, because, God willing, Mrs. Slater is too weak from her wounds and polluted with pond scum to get far enough for help. The girls gather in the kitchen to discuss this new development. Katie, the rational optimist, believes that Mrs. Slater was not dead when they put her in the pool, and is sympathetic to her plight, despite however disadvantageous to herself it might be. Stevie's whereabouts are unknown, and Katie takes this as an opportunity to shine a little sunshine on that problem by concluding that it was a good thing she didn't cut off the pool lights because then they never would have known that Mrs. Slater wasn't in the pool. This is good from her viewpoint because she isn't able to accept just yet that Mrs. Slater is dead; it's good from the other sister's viewpoint because now they won't waste time keeping idiots from swimming in a cess pool and later dragging the dangerous waters for a corpse that isn't there. Vickie, who has the most at stake regardless of whether Mrs. Schrodinger-Slater is alive or not, focuses on the more pressing problem of finding her, alive or dead or in-between, before someone else does. Katie wants to call the police; they will find Mrs. Slater for sure; but Vickie organizes a search and simultaneous cover up by sending Margot to pack some of Mrs. Slater's clothes to make it look as if she took a trip. Margot goes into Mrs. Slater's room, cries a bit, then goes in the attic where the trap door falls down and a body falls on her. Just who this body is and how it got there is such a perplexing question it immediately negates the question as to whether the body, whoever it is, made a body out of Margot by falling on her. The other sisters find Margot and think that the body is Mrs. Slater, and although they wonder how she got up there, at least the question as to whether or not she is dead is satisfactorily answered, even if at the expense of two perhaps even more pesky questions: why did she go into the attic, and why did she wrap herself back up in the towels before dying? The sisters cannot of course suspect just yet that the body might not be Mrs. Slater, a question the movie brilliantly leaves open – subtly knitting the plot even thicker by implying that the killer, who might be Mrs. Slater after all, disposed of Stevie in the attic and now the sisters are disposing of one of their own instead. It would be checkmate indeed to have your victims dispose of each other for you under the false impression that they are covering up their own murder that you had nothing to do with. Katie wants to inspect the body, but Vickie is ever practical and wants to bury Mrs. Slater in the cemetery, where no one will ever look for her in someone else's grave. Margot loses control and runs away, Katie running after her and thus splitting the group. Margot goes to her room and has a glass of whiskey, then finds a musical clown-box on the balcony to her room, which she is just drunk enough to play with as a killer sneaks up from behind her and impales her through the chest after the clown pops out of the box. As she is stabbed, I believe, she belches out some gas that the whiskey gave her. Katie comes into her room later, where she doesn't find either Margot or traces of Margot, but she finds the clown box and is suspicious enough of that. Vickie gives the keys to a large van to Diane and then decides that Jeanie, Liz, and herself need to hide Mrs. Slater's body in a dumpster as they transport it from the house to the van. Surely no one will suspect something is awry as they push a thousand-pound dumpster to a van any more than if the sisters dismembered Mrs. Slater and took her to the van piece-by-piece in separate trash bags that the party has probably, despite the band, already accumulated. Meanwhile Katie goes up into the attic and finds more clown paraphernalia than any sane person would go on believing normal even for John Wayne Gacy. She is startled by Pete, who is visibly drunker and therefore drunk enough to have persuaded himself to ride out the party because he is too drunk to enjoy himself privately. Meanwhile Diane is killed in the van, which creates a new problem: now there is a body in the van and the dumpster, as well as Stevie and or Mrs. Slater and or Moustache-Man and or Margot a variety of somewheres elses. This is the point in the movie where the crimes become compounded beyond the ability of distinguishing them as individual felonies. The dumpster crime scene is three-times removed from the original murder, which occurred at the pool, then Mrs. Slater supposedly moved herself unawares to the attic and died, making a new crime scene with no one knows how many in between, and is now on her way to the van that has now become both another crime scene added to the original murder as well as a new crime scene all its own. Therefore the killer is creating new crime scenes out of each secondary crime scene the sisters themselves create on their way to bury Mrs. Slater – and all this if the body really is Mrs. Slater and not any of the above other victims, which would complicate the whole primary-secondary crime-scene logic beyond my comprehension and therefore surely theirs. As the other sisters push the dumpster along, they run into another problem when they push it right into a parked police car. One of the sisters runs away to provide the appropriate probable cause as an irritated cop gets out of the car and looks at the tail-light they busted. Upon reflection, however, the busted tail-light is a good thing: it explains the uncontrollable fear they can't help but express, and as for why they are pushing a dumpster in dresses late at night towards no apparent goal – well, they are sorority girls. He asks what they have in the dumpster, which is now I suppose operating as a vehicle and can be searched because I have no doubt the sisters have been drinking. I would not be the fool, however, to get in the dumpster and search it myself on the off-chance that they were transporting drugs in it. Fate intervenes, however, and after getting called to the station, the cop actually tells them to turn the dumpster around and take it back home. Jeanie, the sister who ran from the cop, makes it back to the house but is attacked by the killer along the way. When she makes it safely back inside, she tells Katie about it, and now the cat is it out of the bag as far as the killer is concerned. But, killer or no killer, this probably won't have any affect on Vicki and her determination to bury Mrs. Slater. The party has finally winded down. When the Pi Thetas get to partying, no amount of dead bodies will slow them down. The killer busts in through the backdoor, and Jeanie arms herself with a butcher knife and runs into a community bathroom, vomits in a toilet, then gives her precise location away by flushing it, and is killed. Later in the movie, Katie will find her severed head floating in the toilet with a sarcastic look on her face, her hunt for Jeanie having ended no less unhappier than her hunt for any other character in this movie. Now there are only three sisters left, who have almost twice their number of dead bodies to deal with, and since only Jeanie's head is in the toilet, one head in one location and the rest of it God knows where else besides. Meanwhile Vickie and the other sister get the dumpster to the van, where Diane no longer remains. They drive the van to a cemetery, where they plan to bury Mrs. Slater in a plot that has already been dug, which is lucky because they aren't often empty, ready-to-bury plots in cemeteries and I wouldn't want to live in a town where there were. The empty funeral plot implies that there was another, unrelated death just prior to Mrs. Slater's murder that the sisters are using to cover up her murder. Perhaps that's the body Karen Greenlee is having fun with, still waiting to be buried in 1982. Katie finds the medical locket that Mrs. Slater was wearing, which has emergency numbers on it. What she had been searching for I can't remember, although it was unmistakably someone: Katie is the only sister who searches for people who are still alive, and always either just misses them getting murdered or finds their dead body – the live people being just as hard to find as the dead. She calls the number on the locket and tells Mrs. Slater's doctor, Dr. Beck, on the other end that Mrs. Slater is missing along with several of her sisters. When the doctor arrives, he explains that Mrs. Slater was the subject of a medical experiment to impregnate sterile women, and the result was a monstrous son named Eric who is supposedly dead. Mrs. Slater continues, however, to celebrate his birthday – which is today – and go on as if he were still alive. Katie suddenly thinks to look for her friends in the pool, which can only mean that Katie believes they are dead. Sure enough, when she turns the lights on there are three dead bodies in the pool, which was the primary scene for the crime that got this movie started and is now a disposal site for the secondary characters who died in it's wake. Katie and the doctor go to the cemetery to find the other sisters. Vickie and Liz, however, are both killed and put in the empty plot Vickie had dug a little deeper to accommodate Mrs. Slater. On the way to discovering this, Katie realizes that, because Mrs. Slater isn't dead and is presumed to be the killer at this point, then the body in the attic must have been Stevie's. When they get to the cemetery and discover the dead bodies of Vickie and the other girl, it cannot be ignored that Mrs. Slater has killed three sisters and disposed of them in the pool, then killed the other two after they made the job of burying them a little easier for herself. Katie and Dr. Beck then unveil the body, but for once I'm not going to tell you who it is. I want you to watch this movie, and I don't want to spoil anything. The movie has a great ending; that much I promise. I only wanted to explain how brilliant the plot is up until this very moment. Copies of this movie are easy to find – although maybe a little expensive – and I highly recommend it. You won't be let down. I promise. |