Sorority Row (2009)

In case you ever worried that Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson had successfully shamed the nonsensical teen slasher out of existence with their instantly classic pastiches of the genre’s silly conventions (“Scream” and “Scream 2″), you needn’t have. Rest assured that absurdity is alive and well…and living on “Sorority Row.”

It all starts with a mean girl prank during rush week. A half-dozen senior Theta Pi sisters decide that it’s high time they exacted revenge on one of their cheating boyfriends — no matter that she actually cheated first or that he’s the biological brother of one the six catty wenches. The girls represent the predictable gamut of personalities. There’s Jessica (Leah Pipes), the blonde ice queen who looks eerily like a young Cindy McCain; Ellie, the mousie scholarship kid in glasses and pigtails (Rumer willis, proving that nepotism is still afoot in Hollywood); Claire, the pretty, feeble-minded one (Jamie Chung); Chugs, the wild-child super-slut (Margo Harshman); and of course, Cassidy, the brunette with the conscience (Briana Evigan).

Megan, the woman scorned, (played with the usual dead-eyed sanpaku we’ve come to expect from reality star Audrina Partridge) pretends to allow boyfriend Garrett to slip her a date-rap drug and then pretends to overdose on it. The rest of the Thetas faux-freak out. But the girls play their parts a little too well. The hoax goes awry when Garrett, convinced by the sorors that he’s accidentally murdered his girlfriend, actually murders his girlfriend by plunging a tire iron into her still-breathing lungs. Oopsie.

That sends head hen Jessica into damage-control mode. She’s got too much to lose to let a little old thing like manslaughter get in the way of the most awesome senior year ever, not to mention her planned marriage to the dreamboat senator’s son she’s got her claws in. So she invokes the Theta Pi sisterhood code of “trust, respect, solidarity, and secrecy” — with extra emphasis on that last one, natch — to keep all the other chickadees in check. When Jessica suggests that the best course of action is to dump Megan’s body down a mine shaft and head on back to the party, all but Cassidy, who needs a little extra persuasion, fall right in line. So much for sisterhood.

The action resumes eight months later at graduation, when dead girl’s kid sister (played by pizza heiress and Paris Hilton BFF Caroline D’Amore) shows up. The murdering bitches start getting creepy text messages from dead girl’s phone and a killer in a hooded robe starts wielding a “pimped out” tire iron on a grad night campus rampage. But these pretty little liars are such awful humans that you can’t possibly mind when awful things start to happen to them or anyone who would choose to be around them.

“Sorority Row” is a film so laughably predictable that the casual passerby of my darkened movie theater might have guessed we were watching a revival of “Eddie Murphy Raw” rather than a re-make of Mark Rosman’s 1983 slasher flick, “The House on Sorority Row.” Directed by Stewart Hendler, from a screenplay by Josh Stolberg and Peter Goldfinger, “Sorority Row” is everything that deserved to be lampooned by Craven and Williamson more than a decade ago. If you’ve seen “Scream,” you can easily guess which of the sorority girls is the first to get the tire-iron treatment (hint: sluts always die first) and what happens when the stupid one decides to go exploring a strange noise on her own.

I would critique the acting in the film if there were any actors — besides the too-little-seen Carrie Fisher — in it. Note to whichever Hollywood exec greenlighted this mess: celebutards are not actors. It’s a distinction called into stark relief when Fisher shoulders her shotgun to get at the hooded baddie and campily bellows “Don’t think I’m afraid of you. I run a house with 50 crazy bitches.” For all the gut-busting laughter I indulged in throughout the movie’s 100-minute runtime, it’s the first moment I’m convinced was intended to elicit a chuckle.

Sadly, “Sorority Row” doesn’t even deliver in the one area a movie like it can usually be counted on. Its titular location seems to promise at the very least the stuff of teenage boys’ late-night cable entertainment. But the ride is both scare- and sex-free. And the only boobs on display are too stupid to know to take their tops off.