SORORITY HOUSE MASSACRE – One good thing about life is tracking down eighties slashers I haven’t yet seen. Another generally quite good thing is the Concorde logo, it’s not always harbinger of a good time but it sometimes is. SHM is as shameless and cheapshit as they come. It’s basically just a stilted rip-off of 'Halloween' and any generic slasher movie set on a campus. It’s from the mid-eighties, and a straightforward mid-eighties slasher really is the definition of turning up late for the party with an empty bottle. Why do I like it so much, then? It’s just so f*cking silly. I don’t have time to run through the plethora of stupidity on show, but I just really like stuff such as the bit where the Michael clone decides he needs a knife, so he walks into a hardware store in broad daylight, smashes open a glass cabinet, grabs a blade and stabs the owner – all done as a throwaway aside with the dramatic tone of a TV ad for a local car showroom. Or the bit where someone takes care descending a ladder, but then in the next shot doesn’t seem to notice the serial killer standing a few rungs down. Or the bit where a house we know to be quite small starts to seem infinite just because they needed people to run around endlessly for half an hour etc etc. The surrounding ambience is leg warmers, PiL posters and clunky dream sequences. I could watch this kind of shit for hours. You could almost put it in the same zone as ‘Evil Laugh’ and ‘Moonstalker’, but it’s played dead straight, which makes it so much better.
 |