SororityRow Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Just take a look at that weekend box office. Sure, the critically panned Couples Retreat came in at #1, earning over $32 million on 3000 screens. But scan down the list and look at #4, which was Paranormal Activity. It earned $7.9 million on 160 screens. That's not a typo. One hundred and sixty screens. If we take the average, Paranormal Activity earned $49,375 per screen, and Couples Retreat took in a paltry $10,666 per screen. That's five times as many butts in the seats for the horror film than for the unfunny comedy (which means that there must have been a lot of empty seats at the latter). There's a simple reason for this: Paranormal Activity is a genuinely scary movie.

The same goes for any of the "body genres," i.e. comedies, steamy films, weepies, etc. If they genuinely work, and genuinely elicit the response that they promise, they will be a hit every time. Horror buffs -- myself included -- probably see more than a dozen new "scary" movies in the theater each year, but it's only once every few years that we actually get scared at one of them. Paranormal Activity achieves this by doing something very simple and not at all new: it doesn't show anything (or, rather, it shows very little). It knows that nothing that can be shown onscreen can equal the fears and nightmares of the people in the audience, and that the fear of the unknown is the greatest fear of all.

Within five minutes, I suspected the movie was a stinker; within 15 minutes, my suspicions were confirmed. Yet I stayed until the end of Sorority Row, a horrid pustule on the hind quarters of horror, filled with self-described bitches, sluts, and hos, and not enough Carrie Fisher with a shotgun. "Admit it, these are horrible people," one character says, describing the sisters of Theta Pi sorority who are the ostensible stars of the movie. And why would you want to hang out with horrible people for any more time than is absolutely necessary? So why didn't I walk out?

I have, in fact, walked out of movies before: at this year's SXSW, for example, I walked out of my third movie of the day within 15 minutes because I wasn't laughing at the comedy and had two more movies to see later that evening. I wasn't assigned to review it, but it sounded interesting; when it fell flat for me, I cut my losses and got some fresh air. I walked out of a shorts program at Fantastic Fest last year because I grew weary of viewing so much blood and too many disgusting images. And I've stomped out of non-fest flicks due to technical problems (i.e. poor projection and/or sound) and demanded my money back.

Somehow, though, the idea that I'd already been dumb enough to pay $9.50 on a Friday night to see the umpteenth flaccid remake of an 80s horror flick made me dig in my heels.

Ho-hum, another Tyler Perry movie, another first place opening. The man is a franchise unto himself, obviously, and it's somewhat heartening that this -- his seventh film in four years -- is his consensus best; maybe Lionsgate will actually screen his next one (coming in April, natch) for critics. I Can Do Bad All By Myself didn't put up the numbers that Madea Goes to Jail did earlier this year (despite the apparent presence of Madea -- I wonder if her name in the title is what makes the difference), but $24 million was more than enough for first place on a low-key weekend.

Interesting that first second and third place this week went to films by Lionsgate, Focus and the Weinstein Co., respectively. Second place went to Focus's 9, which opened on Wednesday to mixed reviews and around $15 million for the five days; the distributor aimed low, with a 1600 screen release, and the film did probably as well as it could have, despite that spectacular trailer. Inglourious Basterds, still holding up pretty well, took third and crossed the $100 million mark.

Further down the list we see a weird glut of late-summer horror: Whiteout and Sorority Row opened against each other, just a couple weeks after The Final Destination and Halloween II opened against each other. Both of this week's openers wound up with about $5 million to show for it; given that neither is a brand name or particularly distinctive, they probably didn't lose much. Halloween II sank out of the top 10, while The Final Destination hung around and is now the top-grossing movie in the franchise with $58 million.

The top ten films after the jump.

Another in the seemingly endless line of horror remakes, Sorority Row has the distinction of being based on one of the most forgettable of the 1980s slasher ripoffs, The House on Sorority Row (1983), which even the preeminent drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs called "average." That basically means the new film has the freedom to start from scratch, with no real fan club to upset. But the new film also owes a good deal to I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), with the killer inexplicably waiting eight months for her/his revenge after the initial horrible deed.

What happens is this: some sorority sisters decide to play a prank on a cheating boyfriend (Matt O'Leary). One sister gives him some "roofies," which he slips to his ex-girlfriend Megan (Audrina Patridge). He proceeds to make out with the near-comatose girl until she throws up and passes out. The panicked boy and five sorority sisters, plus the playing-possum Megan, pile into a car and head for the hospital, but get lost and wind up at the old mine shaft instead.

One of the things I love best about the internet is that people post movie-related lists and then other people get to comment on all the things the lists did wrong (or, sometimes, did right). Today, in anticipation of this week's Sorority Row, Moviefone posted a list of the ten sexiest scream queens. It's a fun list, and it's wise enough to go all the way back to Fay Wray (King Kong) and Janet Leigh (Psycho), and it includes two essentials: Jamie Lee Curtis (Halloween) and Marilyn Burns (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre). It also includes Shannon Elizabeth, a dubious choice for films like Jack Frost, 13 Ghosts and Cursed (although I'm glad someone has thrown Cursed back into the ring; it's silly but it's also sexy, well-acted and very sharply directed by Wes Craven).

I like Adrienne Barbeau as a choice, too, even though she's really only a "scream queen" in one movie, The Fog (1980). She was a regular in exploitation movies, but she was tougher than usual and enjoyed a fairly wide range of parts, not just "scream queens." And I'm a big fan of both Neve Campbell and the Scream movies. But here's a question. I have to ask, what happened to the original Scream Queens from 1980s exploitation and B-movies? Brinke Stevens, Monique Gabrielle, Linnea Quigley and Michelle Bauer practically patented the term. Starring in films like Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984), Nightmare Sisters (1987), Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity (1987), Vice Academy (1988), Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers (1988), Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama (1988) and The Return of the Swamp Thing (1989).

Last week's new releases took a pummeling from the holdovers from the previous weeks. None of last week's newbies did better than third, with Mike Judge's new comedy Extract landing way back in ninth place. Here's the top five:

1. The Final Destination: $15.3 million
2. Inglourious Basterds: $14.9 million
3. All About Steve: $14 million
4. Gamer: $11.2 million
5. District 9: $9.1 million

Four new ones this week.

9
What's It All About: Animated feature based on director Shane Acker's short film of the same name. In a post-apocalyptic future where humanity seemingly no longer exists, a group of rag doll-like creatures band together to survive the onslaught of machines intent on their destruction.
Why It Might Do Well: Based on the trailer this looks like an imaginative and beautifully designed film and it doesn't hurt that one of the producers is Tim Burton.
Why It Might Not Do Well: 59% at Rottentomatoes.com is a little discouraging.
Number of Theaters: 1,638
Prediction: $9 million

Sorority Row
What's It All About: A crazed killer is messily dispatching college students who were responsible for the death of a schoolmate.
Why It Might Do Well: Maybe the folks who went to see Halloween 2 are still in the mood for some slice 'em dice 'em action.
Why It Might Not Do Well: No star power and a story that looks even less original than most slasher films.
Number of Theaters: 2,500
Prediction: $8 million

Something funny happened at our local press screening for The Hurt Locker this week, and not in the film itself, which is decidedly not funny. The trailer attached to the film was for Sorority Row (pictured), a dumb-looking I Know What You Did Last Summer knock-off in which college students are harassed by a person they thought they'd killed. It was incongruous to see a cheesy horror flick advertised in front of The Hurt Locker, a complex action drama that many critics consider one of the year's best films. It was like screening There Will Be Blood with a trailer for Land of the Lost in front of it.

The reason for it, of course, is that The Hurt Locker and Sorority Row both have the same distributor, Summit Entertainment. When you go to the movies, some of the trailers are just whatever's in rotation, but one or two are usually from the same studio as the film you're watching, sent out with prints of that film with explicit instructions that they be attached. Big distributors (Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, etc.) usually have plenty of upcoming products and can choose trailers that target the same general demographic as the movie they're paired with. But Summit is small -- all they had to choose from was Sorority Row and The Twilight Saga: New Moon. (A Sorority Row trailer in front of New Moon -- now that would make sense.)

So I understand why this particular trailer came with this movie. But it was still a funny juxtaposition. I can't imagine anyone wanting to see both Sorority Row AND The Hurt Locker. Has anyone else ever noticed this phenomenon? If you've seen The Hurt Locker in theaters, was this trailer in front of it, or was it just for the critics' benefit? What other strange combinations of trailers and features have you noticed?

After the jump, the Sorority Row trailer, so you'll know what I'm talking about.

I know, it's been a while since I've written one of these gore-soaked missives, but the upside to that is ... we have a lot to talk about! And since I wrote this during a lazy Sunday (happy belated holidays, btw) I figure it's time to break out the candy-coated bullet points! Let's start out with a freaky fistful of upcoming DVD releases:

Currently strewn across shelves are Donkey Punch and Vinyan, two festival-heavy horror films that couldn't possibly be more different. One's about venal young jerks, and the other is about heartbroken (but stupid) parents. Really bad things happen to all of them.

This Tuesday we're getting the old-school-style monster movie Splinter, which is really quite good. If you like prickly monsters, that is. On the same day ... whoa. It looks like someone actually bothered to exhume flicks like Repossessed, Slaughter High, and My Best Friend Is a Vampire. That sound you just heard was my Netflix queue getting fatter.

Come the 21st we get J.T. Petty's The Burrowers, which played (and played well) at last year's Fantastic Fest, and Robert Hall's Laid to Rest, which is sort of like a non-snarky slasher throwback with a hint of Phantasm-style weirdness. Couldn't find a stranger double feature than these two, believe me.

And mark your calendars, gore-lovers, for April 28, because that's when Martyrs finally hits R1 DVD. According to the UK poster, Scoot Weinberg says it "makes Saw look like Sesame Street," which is one of the most shameless blurbs I've ever heard. Even if the guy is correct, brilliant, and really handsome. (Trust me, this is one rough horror movie.) Also on this Tuesday we'll get the unofficial Donnie Darko sequel, and a movie starring Amber Benson called One-Eyed Monster. I leave the jokes to you fine folks.

It seems that a couple of horror trailers slipped through the proverbial cracks last week, so let's catch up, shall we? For starters, there's the creepy-kid thriller Orphan, in which Vera Farmiga apparently learns no lessons from Joshua and takes in an unusually mature girl with a knack for fatal shenanigans. We've embedded this and the other two trailers after the jump. Orphan opens on July 24th.

Next up is October's slasher remake, Sorority Row, in which a prank goes wrong and the girls who covered it up start getting picked off one by one. Come to think of it, I guess some kids haven't grown up on I Know What You Did Last Summer by this point, but hey, the tweens tend to turn out in droves for anything Carrie Fisher touches.

Last and certainly not least (probably my personal favorite of the bunch) is Funny or Die's mock trailer for Gobstopper, in which a crazed candy maker (played by a scary-perfect Christopher Lloyd) terrorizes Martha "Superbad" MacIssac and friends. I'm sorry to report that there's no word on domestic distribution yet, because I'm pretty sure that I'd rather sit through a full version of this than either of the two above.

Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs
Man, I love that title. I haven't read the kids' book that this is based on but the trailer has tons of charm. Flint Lockwood has always dreamed of being an inventor and now it looks like his latest contraption will solve world hunger as he's got food literally falling from the sky. Not just the titular meatballs, but spaghetti, cheeseburgers and a house made of jello that I thought was particularly cool. The storm clouds start gathering on September 18.

The Cake Eaters
This film concerns the interactions between two families in a small town in upstate New York. The trailer focuses on a budding romance between a guy who works in the school cafeteria and a girl with degenerative neurological disorder, but judging from Erik's review of the film the story covers a lot more. Looks like a worthwhile little drama. It's bypassing theatrical release and arriving on DVD on March 24.

Crank 2
The movie's U.K. site has added a new red band trailer for this action sequel and there's so much packed into the thing I have to wonder if there's anything left for the movie. Jason Statham's heart has been stolen, and I don't mean in a romantic way. The artificial heart he has been left with requires periodic jolts of electricity and, well, it gets a little wacky from there. This will be in U.S. theaters on April 17.