by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched a couple of Lifetime movies, including
the “premiere” of something called Deadly Sorority, an intriguing tale of skullduggery and murder
centered around the student body and faculty at — no, not Whittendale this
time, but Barclay University. It begins with Samantha Blake (Greer Grammer,
Kelsey Grammer’s daughter) and Kristina Roberts (Emilija Baranac), best friends
from high school, attending Barclay together — only their friendship ends
almost as soon as they reach Barclay because Kristina has her heart set on
pledging the school’s most exclusive sorority, Delta Nu, while Samantha shows
up at the sorority house but its principal student leader, Jubilee Swan (Chloe
Babcock), takes an instant dislike to Samantha because she’s not from a rich
family and she shows up with a sarcastic attitude that indicates how little
Samantha thinks of sorority culture and all the snobbery and bullying that goes
along with it. So Samantha suffers the loss of her best friend when Jubilee
orders Kristina not to have anything to do with Samantha any more on pain of
expulsion from Delta Nu. Kristina starts dating the Big Man on Campus, Paul
Riveria (Ross Linton), whose huge, hunky, athletic body is matched only by his
male ego and total disinterest in tying himself down to just one girl — only
within weeks Kristina has broken up with Paul, telling him she’s landed someone
better. We only find out later who the “someone better” is.
Meanwhile, writer
Rolfe Kanefsky and director Shawn Tolleson actually show us some of the
“education” in higher education for a change — all too many college movies make
universities look like elaborate summer camps — including a media class taught
by Amy Thomas (Moira Kelly), who for some reason we don’t at first understand
takes a dislike to Kristina almost instantly; and an English class taught by
Justin Miller (Steve Bacic), who is actually married to Amy but doesn’t let
that stop him from seducing and having brief affairs with just about every
female student at Barclay who will hold still for him. The film begins with the
mysterious disappearance of Tanya Brown (Rachelle Gillis) towards the end of
the previous semester; Tanya was a Delta Nu member and also one of Miller’s
previous student girlfriends. Then Lifetime flashes one of their usual “time”
titles — “Four Months Later” (a bit of a surprise since I had assumed that we
would flash back rather than
forward) — and we see Samantha and Kristina arrive at Barclay together,
Kristina get accepted by Delta Nu while Samantha gets blackballed, and then a
few weeks later Kristina is mysteriously killed in a car crash. The police at
first write it off as an accident but later become convinced that Kristina was
murdered — and they’re convinced Samantha did it out of jealousy over losing
her friendship to Jubilee Swan and the Delta Nu crowd. When Paul is found
unconscious and nearly dead from a drug overdose — and Samantha, who had
crashed the Alpha Sigma fraternity house to ask him about Kristina, is the one
who finds him — the police and the student body, especially those affiliated
with Delta Nu or Alpha Sigma (the two are depicted as having a brother-sister
relationship so Delta Nu girls generally date Alpha Sigma boys), are convinced
Samantha attacked him, too.
Like
a classic Hitchcock hero, Samantha reasons that the only way she’s going to be
able to prove she didn’t commit the murders is to find out who did — and when
she learns from her roommate, former Delta Nu girl Bree Jones (Samantha
Schimmer), who was expelled from the sorority after Jubilee mysteriously turned
against her, that Professors Miller and Thomas are actually married to each
other, and that Miller was in the library talking to Kristina the night
Kristina went missing, Samantha immediately assumes that Miller was having an affair
with Kristina, then got tired of her and killed her. Midway through the movie
we’re dropped a big hint that Amy Thomas is really the killer — that he’s
killing the students her husband has affairs with out of jealousy — but at the
very end we find the real killer is [surprise!] Jubilee Swan, who briefly had an affair with
Professor Miller and decided that he was the love of her life, so she
systematically set about to eliminate any rival — including Tanya, who had her
own dalliance with Miller (did writer Kanefsky name him after Henry Miller?),
ran afoul of Jubilee and got knocked off by her; as well as Bree, who likewise
dallied with the insanely amorous professor and then got taken out just after
Samantha got the information out of her about Miller’s previous activities.
I’ve commented on at least two previous movies with “sorority” in their titles
— Sorority House, a 1939 RKO “B”
written by Dalton Trumbo and directed by John Farrow (Mia’s dad), which didn’t
include out-and-out murder but had some nice little bits of social comment
about the snobbery and cliquishness at the heart of the sorority system; and Sorority
Murder, a previous Lifetime production that
if anything painted an even grimmer portrait of the sorority system than this
one did — indeed, Deadly Sorority
is something of a misnomer as a title because the peril Samantha is in has very
little to do with the sorority as an institution; it’s just that the head of it
is a psycho with an unhealthy crush on a professor who screwed her and abandoned
her, and is going to knock off anyone she thinks stands in the way of her
all-time love.
