Seven members of a sorority plan a graduation party, despite the objections of their domineering house mother, Mrs Slater. When the older woman demands they cancel the party and take down all the decorations, they plan to prank her in revenge. Alas, things get out of control, and the repercussions could well be deadly ...
The House on Sorority Row (AKA House of Evil or Seven Sisters) is a fairly formulaic slasher coming from toward the end of the genre's roughly five year 'golden age' between Halloween and Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. Despite the provocative title and cover image, the film's pretty tame in terms of both sex and violence. Particularly violence, really. There's a fair bit of "here are the shadows of someone being murdered" rather than "here is someone being murdered". This was possibly partly due to the then current furore about "video nasties", but I suspect a bigger driver was probably just that it's a lot cheaper to film shadows than a convincing on-camera 'kill scene'.
The problem with this (presumed) cost-cutting measure is that it needs a quality director to keep up the tension and creepiness in the face of the lack of "payoff" (because let's face it, the kill scenes are a key draw for slasher movies). This movie would need someone like John Carpenter at the helm to really make it work, and well ... it doesn't. The script doesn't do itself many favours in the tension stakes by making the 'final girl' so transparently obvious from the start (and also by failing to actually establish discernible characters for five of the seven young women at all).
This is only for slasher fanatics, and even they are unlikely to find a whole lot to really enthuse about, here.
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