Haunting on Fraternity Row - What Did We Expect?
This movie was atrocious. It was bad even by the standard of bad horror, and I can only say that our biggest mistake was having expectations for this film. It was contrived and dumb and exactly what the doctor ordered. Join us, my dear friends, for Haunting on Fraternity Row.
Why Would You Have Expectations for a Title Like That?
Yeah, okay, granted.
To be fair, what we were looking for was a terrible attempt at genuine horror. What we got was a weird, dissonant mashup between American Pie and that one student horror film that every film major makes. And “mashup” is generous - in reality, it’s like two separate films butted up against one another. The first half of the film is gratuitous drinking, drugs, nudity, the whole sleazy nine yards, and the second half is a rushed attempt at building backstories, character arcs, and a reason to care that a demon is eating students through their eyeballs. Which we don’t.
So let’s overanalyze a weird frat horror film, shall we?
Can’t Wait
Under normal circumstances, I would recommend you watch the film before listening to/reading this. But I think that would qualify as a violation of the Geneva Conventions, so I’m just gonna say: do what you think is right.
In a very, very small nutshell, the movie is about a group of fraternity boys and their sorority counterparts planning for the biggest party of the year, the Luau. As they’re preparing for the party, they stumble upon a hidden, sealed off room filled with light fixtures and an altar. One of the boys picks up the cup sitting on the altar, dubbing it his new drink cup, and they think nothing of it. One of the boys finds out that the house once hosted a cult who raised and hosted a demon, which we can only assume was sealed in the cup, and tries to warn the others (who assume he’s drunk/high/whatever). After what felt like hours of exposition about the house, the dead family, the characters’ weird uninteresting goals, the demon begins picking off partygoers one by one until (SPOILER ALERT) everyone is dead except Jason and Claire, resident goody-two-shoes. They make it until the last two minutes of the movie, when the housekeeper shows up, explains everything that’s been happening as quickly as possible, and then tries to kill both Jason and Claire to seal the demon away before he kills Claire and is released onto the world. She succeeds at killing Jason before the demon gets her, and it looks like Claire might escape. But then the kid who no one would listen to, now apparently privy to all the information the housekeeper gave, shows up and slits Claire’s throat to seal the demon. The end. Seriously.
The interesting thing about this bizarre little movie is that its dialogue has the weird, occasional tendency to be kind of brilliant. Both Olivia and I found ourselves laughing out loud for such gems as “Let’s get some f***ing pyramids on this table. Did you guys study Mesopotamia in high school?” and “That’s six years of college, baby. Who’s wasting money, now? Not me, dad.” Or, my personal favorite, as a kid rubs Burt’s Bees on his eyelids, “I’m beesin’ bro.”
The genius of these ridiculous lines is that it somehow manages to capture how college-aged kids actually talk. Not all of it, mind you, but the writers throw so much spaghetti at the wall that some of it manages to miraculously make the Mona Lisa. These brilliant moments are incredibly organic, especially against the backdrop of the entire rest of the movie. And even more hilariously, the fact that all the characters are deeply unlikable and stupid ends up being points in favor of realism. We have no experience with fraternities, so no word on whether that depiction is accurate, but we do know mid-20s boys and horror movies. So when we see a group of drunk young dudes doing stupid stuff in the face of mortal danger, we ended up fully believing that it aligned with their characters. It was a ball of weird, bad character consistency.
I Thought You Said It Was a Waste of Time
Oh, it is. There is absolutely nothing genuinely redeeming about this movie, and the aforementioned genius is so rare that it couldn’t possibly make up for anything else. It fails on every level at everything it seems to aspire to be. I actually wondered if the film was a giant scheme to appeal to losers like us who hunt for terrible horror because, while certainly terrible, this barely qualified as horror. It was an easy 40% gratuitous, sleazy B-roll of half naked girls getting doused in booze, 20% meaningless conversation, 20% exposition, and 20% horror special effects testing.
As a horror movie, it attempts to mix the college frat stereotype with the demon-possessed house trope and fails miserably. By virtue of the first genre, we don’t care about any of the characters and actively look forward to the promised blood bath. But there isn’t one - the final act is simply comprised of the demon slowly murdering students in a strange, vague feeding ritual that results in their eyes being sucked out. And, as I said on the show, I’m convinced the eye thing was just because that was the cheapest makeup effect they could buy in bulk at Party City. It’s atrocious and every death left me feeling more unsatisfied than the last. And this movie had the audacity to be an hour and forty minutes long. Let. Me. Die.
What’s the Worst Part?
What a completely unfair question I just asked myself.
If I’m being broad, it’s the whole conceit, just the entire concept. The plot is unambitious and still manages to be too ambitious for itself. It wastes so much time that it shoots itself in the foot. Twice. With a shotgun. And dynamite. In one breath, it revels in its own debauchery with scene after scene after agonizing scene of full frontal nudity and keg stands; but in the next, it paints itself as a morality play by daring to demand that we care about Good Boy Jason and his Good Girl love interest, Claire, both of whom present as dry pieces of toast compared to the other caricatures. Morality in this movie is reduced down to “drinking, drugs, sex = evil & cancer walks, doctors, abtinence = perfect good angels” which is a wholly bizarre thesis for a college frat movie with demons.
Also, as an aside, I’m calling out the writer of this movie. Dude, you wrote the most one-dimensional, cookie-cutter characters in existence and still managed to insult my intelligence with the level of malicious effort you put into writing Liza (cheerleader-y, sorority leader girl). I don’t need a reason to hate your characters, dude, they suck by default. So when you wrote her character description as “biggest b**** on the planet multiplied by eleven, was Hitler in another life” you showed your hand big time. Just say you hate women and live out your weird, uninspired revenge fantasy. This is the only part of the movie that made me actively angry - I was suffocated with reasons to hate Liza, and yet the only thing I could think about was how transparent the writer’s hatred of women was. I get it, man, you she broke up with you. Move on.
Whoa, Dude.
I digress.
This movie is a steaming pile. Olivia loved it, and I understand why. I hated it, and she understands why. If you want a full breakdown of the film, listen to the episode and hear our maniacal laughter in real time. Or watch the film. Or don’t. Seriously, it felt like it was 3 hours long. Save yourself. Save me. My brain will never be the same.