“Sorority Slaughterhouse” (2016) Directed by David DeCoteau. Starring Eric Roberts, Jessica Morris and Jean Louise O’Sullivan. Bad girl sorority sisters are locked in a house with a deranged killer doll. After a sorority sister ends her affair with a college Dean, he transfers his soul into a talking clown doll and proceeds to target his former love and her bikini clad pals.
Since you should never watch this film, I’m going to spoil what little there is to know. (If you’re determined to torment your brain, stop reading now.)
At the world’s smallest college campus, lovestruck Dean Whitman can’t believe his ears. After leaving his wife and family for a beautiful Delta Pi sorority sister, the girl breaks his heart over the phone AND sends him a mystifying gift to soften the blow: a hideous 12-inch tall clown doll named Bobo, created by voodoo priestess Madame Petro, who helpfully wrote her mystical occupation and name on the doll’s packaging.
The Dean might also be upset because his cheap looking office is the size of a bathroom stall.
Over the phone, Whitman takes being dumped pretty well. He immediately swears bloody vengeance on his nubile young girlfriend and her friends. Then it’s time for a completely out of nowhere suicide by revolver. Bobo magically absorbs the dead man’s spirit into his stiff cloth body.
Like Gary Busey in the original “Gingerdead Man,” Eric Roberts has very little screen time but voices the killer puppet throughout. But during his scant scenes as himself, Roberts manages to redefine overacting.
No, no…redefine doesn’t quite say it. It’s like he tore through the fabric of the space-time continuum just to bring us five minutes of delicious nuttiness.
Someone asked him for a light, and he gave them an entire bonfire. He comes close to attaining the level of Keanu Reeves’s Free Pizza speech when describing the sorority sisters:
“I swear, if you do this to me, you’ll pay…you and all your sorority bitches who tease and taunt men with your nubile bodies, pouting lips and eyes that sparkle like pools of sunshine filled with hopes and dreams of a better tomorrow.”
Wow, man. Heavy.
While the campus might be tiny, the sisters of Delta Pi live like queens in a vast beige beachfront castle, complete with a parapet, where they tan and chat about boys.
There’s horny bimbo Vicky, sun tanning aficionado Kitty, nerdy and awkward Nina, demon summoning Goth witch Allie and practical sister Fawn. Apparently, Delta Pi has no pledging standards, because this is the oddest mix of people imaginable. Allie wants to pull Satan out of Hell so she can mate with him and obtain demonic powers that will enable her to destroy Great Britain, for some reason. Nina wants to be sexy and confident like Vicky, and Fawn loves her big dummy of a man and is somewhat afraid of Allie. Kitty just longs for a nice even tan.
Fawn’s idiotic boyfriend Marcus and frat dude Dick soon arrive to party for the weekend, and it sorta looks like Fawn herself was the deceased Dean Whitman’s main squeeze before she met Marcus and dumped the Dean.
When Lucifer fails to materialize in Allie’s bedroom, she switches back to lusting after Fawn. While Marcus is screwing Fawn in another room, Allie performs a spell that allows her to experience everything Fawn feels and vice versa. She uses this connection to hurt herself and therefore disrupt the lovemaking by causing Fawn shared pain.
25 minutes after Vicky and Dick begin a passionless make out session by the pool, we cut back to them and they’re still gently pecking at each other’s faces. Haven’t they rubbed their lips off by now?
Nina is writing an erotic novel based on Vicky’s exploits, which she watches through comically over-sized binoculars while speaking into a mic for dictation and masturbating with a pink vibrator. Her pent-up lust ultimately spells her doom when the vibrator’s batteries fail and Bobo offers to replace the device by vibrating his body.
Soon after, eternally kissing couple Vicky and Dick meet the clown out by the pool.
Turns out it was witchy Allie who sent Bobo to Whitman, and that she was his mistress. When Allie learns that the Dean has been found dead and that the clown doll she sent him is not with his body, she freaks out.
Allie explains to Marcus and Fawn that Whitman’s soul was inside the tiny doll that is hacking up the sisters. They naturally peg her as insane and lock her in her room after she’s been knocked unconscious. When she wakes up, she spills the beans. After a prank caused the Dean to investigate the sorority, Allie cast a lust spell on him that caused infatuation. They began a 3-month affair, and she got bored and fell for Fawn.
Finally deciding to end it, she sent Whitman a Transference Doll that would absorb the lust spell and leave the man normal again. Instead, his soul became stuck in the doll.
Turns out Bobo kills after becoming aroused because he can’t have sex. He’s frustrated, and chock full of homicidal rage.
“You can’t do this!”
“I’m a 12-inch clown doll with no genitalia and a huge sex drive. I can do whatever I want.”
Fawn learns that Allie has invaded her dreams to plant the seeds of attraction, and magically gives her spontaneous orgasms throughout her school day. And Nina, the lusty nerd, used to be a straight laced student before Allie increased her libido and made her sex crazed.
The final showdown, such as it is, involves a very bizarre seduction, a bath, the garbage disposal of a sink and lots of violent camera shaking. It is definitely a thing that happens at the end of the film. Yep, sure is. I wouldn’t exactly use the word “Slaughterhouse” to describe anything that happens in the film, but the title Sorority Mild Inconvenience has much less zing.
Body count:
- A man is unconvincingly killed by gunshot to the head.
- A woman is killed by forcible consumption of drain cleaner.
- A woman is killed by having a clown doll enter her vagina and travel through her body.
- A man has a balloon inserted into his throat and inflated, suffocating him.
- A woman is strangled with a jump rope.
- A man is killed by a spiked pie pan to the face.
- A woman is stabbed to death.
Unfortunately, Bobo’s puppeteering effects are pretty awful.
We get drab POV footage, shots of Bobo’s stick-like legs walking, or high angles of his chest and head as he bobs up and down in a pantomime of forward motion. Unlike Chucky, Bobo’s hands are incapable of holding weapons because his fingers don’t move, so it looks extra silly when he’s brandishing a knife that was probably glued on. Mostly he just stands around making off-color and stupefying unfunny comments about the girls.
He’s also quite sleazy, but in a movie with zero sex or nudity, the little guy is out of luck.
Sorority Slaughterhouse features some strange continuity and editing choices, as well. At one point, we cut away from the action at the Delta house to an exterior shot of the Dean’s office, as if to assure us that the building is still there. Nothing happens and about a minute later, we cut back to the girls at Delta. Huh?
Keep a close eye out for the shadows of crew members moving across walls behind the characters.
Truth be told, I’m a fan of schlockmeister David DeCoteau, a protégé of Roger Corman. I discovered him in the late 1980s with “Dr. Alien,” “Sorority Babes In The Slime Bowl-o-Rama,” “Creepozoids” and more. He’s known for campy humor, sex appeal, rubbery special effects and a creating a wonderfully trashy ambiance.
This baffling effort, which seems like legit Grade-Z fun on the surface, is surprisingly joyless. Meh.