Starting a review of a movie this terrible is a difficult thing. I have a soft spot for aspiring filmmakers as I used to work on micro budget movies myself but just because you don't have a lot of money does not excuse you from making the best movie you can. Over the years, I have seen a number of instances where a movie looks like it was made by someone with no artistic talent or originality and immediately they say that it is not their fault as they only had $500. Well, if that is the case, maybe you should have saved up a little longer and spared us the ordeal of having to sit through your piece of crap. Furthermore, you do not need any money to write a great script and then decide how you can pull it off. This is the foundation you should be starting from because if the script is full of uninteresting dialogue, stock characters, and a weak plot, no amount of money is going to make it any better. In the case of The Sorority, it seems like they really wanted to make a movie and didn't really care how it turned out because I can't see how anyone could believe they were making a good movie here.

The movie opens with the military finding a burned or skinned (I couldn't tell) body in the forest. From there, we are introduced to a girl who is onto the satanic shenanigans of the local sorority and tries to save a fellow student from being sacrificed. Instead, she is captured by the evil sisters and made to listen to terrible slogans like "I join therefore we are". From there, we cut to the girl's sister Isabel (April Cook) who enrolls in the college months later to investigate her sibling's disappearance. Isabel meets a nice guy love interest named Cal (L. Michael Burt), gets a roommate (TaNeisha Bennett) and meets some of the other girls on campus. Before long, she is working her way into the sorority and eventually becomes at odds with them when she starts snooping too far. There are many scenes of Isabel on campus, at the sorority house, and trying to convince the police of the nasty things going on such as decapitations and murder. These scenes all seem very long and this is not helped by the overall running time, which should have been shortened by at least 20 minutes.

Writer/director Bodie Norton is obviously a fan of the genre as he shows us when a bunch of names are dropped during roll call in a classroom (Peter Neal, Suzy Bannion, Marion Crane). While I was impressed with these clever references to Dario Argento and Alfred Hitchcock as well as an attempt to give a nod to Blade Runner at one point, I could not help but wonder why he didn't learn anything from the masters. Everything in this flick feels amateur and rushed from the performances by the actors to the camera moves to the special effects. Even the music has that generic action-movie sound that lacks any sort of creativity. I don't enjoy ripping on movies and especially don't like ripping on first-time directors but Norton should have done a lot better with this. When looking at the footage, he should have known that the end result was not going to be good but in this era when it is possible to make a movie for cheap and self-release it, I guess he didn't care. The one good thing I can say is that at least the movie makes sense and I was able to follow the plot without being lost in the director's vision that only he understands.

One area that I found particularly annoying was in the area of sound design. There is a scene at the beginning where a character is being accosted in a cave and you can hear sounds like runners squeaking on a gym floor. Another time when this is really noticeable is during a house party when all background noise disappears for most of the scene. It's a freaking party; we should at least hear some voices and/or music during scenes like this. It would have added some production value and made the movie more realistic. This happens later in the film as well when a sorority girl is impaled on a wall screaming. The screaming then stops while our hero fights another demon and then starts again once that demon is dispatched. It is sloppy moments like this that make me wonder what the Hell they were thinking during the editing process or if they were just blindly ignorant. It is this blatant disregard for the audience that make me question why movies like this are made in the first place. If you are not playing towards your potential viewer, what is the point? (Josh Pasnak, 12/13/09)

Directed By: Bodie Norton.
Written By: Bodie Norton.

Starring: April Cook, Deirdre Kristen Williams, L. Michael Burt, Grindl Lamon.

Picture Ratio: Full Frame.

Picture Quality: I found this to be slightly on the grainy side and the image was not as clear as would be expected from a DVD release.

Extras: We get a commentary from a number of the actresses in the film. This commentary consists of the girls talking about what is happening on the screen and not much else. I did not get any insight into the making of the film and felt like this was a waste of time to sit through. The only other extra we get is a trailer.