directed by William Fruet
Key Video, 1986
There's prime mid-eighties cheesiness aplenty in this sorority horror extravaganza. After about ten minutes of filler material (including an unrelated funeral scene and an endless music video by Night Ranger clones White Sister) we get to the story of three college freshmen: perky Phoebe, kooky Vivia and anxiety-prone Jennifer. They're pledging Sigma Alpha Phi, and the big initiation scene is pretty memorable. "Tonight, Jennifer, Phoebe and Vivia are slime buckets," proclaims head pledge tormentor Veronica. "Tomorrow, they will be goats!" On Goat Night (not to be confused with Hog Day in School Spirit) the sorority throws their big costume party in the abandoned fraternity house where a pledge met his end years ago during "that accident with the guillotine." The sorority girls have an elaborate prank set up for their fraternity dates, and the guys have one in the works for them, but things finally start getting good when the dead pledge's ghost possesses Jennifer, who dresses up in an old-fashioned diving outfit and starts bludgeoning, dismembering and drowning her fellow party guests (off-camera, though). Finally, Phoebe and Vivia must try to escape the house while Jennifer crawls around on the ceiling with her tongue hanging out. The last scene plays like everyone involved just gave up and went home, but who needs an ending when you've got a theme song as twisted as "Best Times," which sounds like the Shaggs singing a Bananarama outtake on karaoke night.
Joanna Johnson (who plays Jennifer) looks a lot like a young Cybill Shepherd until she gets possessed, then she looks like Karen Black at the end of Trilogy of Terror. The credits at the beginning proclaim "Introducing Joanna Johnson," but after nine years maybe I should finally give up waiting for her follow-up. Also on board are Paul Bartel as an English professor and Endless Love star Martin Hewitt as Jennifer's ill-fated boyfriend.
Even though nothing much happens until the last fifteen minutes, Joanna's pretty cool, and there's something almost hypnotic about the way this bubblegum horror flick just bops along with nothing on its mind. Killer Party shows up late at night on TBS sometimes, and since there's hardly any nudity or gore to begin with, there's very little edited out, so that's probably the best place to see it (my brother and I actually saw it in a theater when it came out, if you can believe that).
-- Rich Osmond