Sorority Secrets (Sunshine Films, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” movie, Sorority Secrets, turned out to be unexpectedly good even though “sorority,” like “cheerleader,” is one of those words promising tantalizing glimpses of young, nubile female flesh in a scanty minimum of clothing and thereby hoping to lure straight men into turning on this channel. Produced by the Florida-based Sunshine Films in association with Reel One Entertainment, directed by old Lifetime hand Damián Romay and written by Kelly Peters and Amy Katherine Taylor, Sorority Secrets is a variation on the J. Bryan Dick-Barbara Kymlicka stories like Babysitters’ Black Book and the other “Whittendale Universe” stories Ken Sanders’ production company has churned out for Lifetime about hot young college women either becoming mistresses or out-and-out prostitutes of well-connected middle-aged (or older) alumni to earn the money either to get into Whittendale in the first place or keep paying the ever-rising tuition and costs. Given that neither Sanders, Dick or Kymlicka were involved in Sorority Secrets, it’s interesting to note how differently Romay, Peters and Taylor play it — less for titillation and more for terror. In the opening scene Cassie Thompson (Brytnee Ratledge) learns just before she’s supposed to start her sophomore year in college that the funding for the scholarship she was counting on to pay her way has suddenly been withdrawn, and she tearfully tells her mother Debra (Elisabetta Fantone) that she’ll have to drop out and go to a community college instead. Mom, who’s so young-looking she’s frequently mistaken for Cassie’s older sister (make a note of that: it’s a “plant” of a plot point that’s going to be important later!), says not on your life — I haven’t worked all those years to support you just to palm you off on a proletarian education and the dead-end career it will prepare you for.

She insists that there must be a way to keep Cassie in her expensive four-year school, and the way suddenly arrives in the person (or persons) of the Lambda sorority. She goes to their recruitment table and at first is refused even to be given the application, but eventually (on the advice of a friend who tells her the Lambdas always give an initial rejection to see if the girl is serious enough about getting in to go to the table and ask again) Cassie gets the application, turns it in and is accepted. She’s also told by Wendy Klein (Marie Debrey), the college staff member in charge of administering the sorority, that Lambda membership gets with some really impressive perks, including a free ride through college and, for those who win their way onto the important “soc committee” (pronounced “sosh,” as in “social”) that plans the sorority’s big public events, free clothes, accessories and all-expense-paid trips to visit other Lambda chapters at universities all across the country. When Cassie asks how the sorority gets the money to afford to give its members all these goodies, she’s told it’s because of the generosity of well-to-do male alumni of the university. We’re immediately aware of just what the well-to-do male alumni are expecting in return for their generosity — indeed, Lambda has gone beyond the little student-run sex-for-sale enterprises of the Whittendale films and become a full-fledged human trafficking operation, supplying a continuous stream of hot young girls for sexual services to older men that has kept Lambda in business for decades and set up a rather dubious tradition Wendy thinks it’s her job to continue.

We start getting intimations of this when Kerrie (Shayna Bernado) is walking down the street, talking to her mother on her cell phone and telling mom she’s not only leaving Lambda but dropping out of the college altogether because “they want me to do really terrible things” (were they pushing her beyond vanilla sex and insisting she meet some alumnus’s demands for a girl he could physically dominate and torture S/M style?) — and just then two hands belonging to a figure we really don’t get a good look at push her off the train station platform, where she’s run over (ironically) by the train she’d planned to board to go home to her mom. Later another girl at the sorority gets pushed in the way of a semi-truck — a fate Cassie concludes was meant for her since she had lent the other girl her powder-blue hoodie (needless to say, the assailant was wearing the obligatory black hoodie that’s become obligatory for Lifetime killers, especially when they want to conceal their gender — in fact they’ve used that device so often that by now whenever you see someone in a black hoodie attack another person in a Lifetime movie, it’s a good bet that the assailant is a woman) — and still later, just after Cassie has had two unpleasant run-ins with an alumnus named Simon Hughes (Duncan Bahr — and at least casting director Lori Wyman didn’t make the mistake of her opposite numbers in the Whittendale movies — Hughes is O.K.-looking but hardly one of the hot babe magnets who played the johns in the Whittendale movies, men you could imagine the Whittendale hookers wanting to bed even if they weren’t being paid to do so), who was promising her a paid internship for his pharmaceutical company but made no secret that sexual services were part of the deal, Cassie decides to take her complaint to the college Ethics Committee.

Only Cassie can’t say she personally witnessed any Lambda girls being sold into slavery in the sexual marketplace, and the girl who can, Lois Mathers (Jessica Galinas), is a recovering drug addict who went through rehab. She swears she hasn’t used since, but she lied on her Lambda application and said she’d never used drugs — and she’s worried about being thrown out of the sorority and losing her free ride if she’s found out. But this becomes the least of her problems: the day she and Cassie are supposed to meet with the Ethics Committee, Lois is found in her room at Lambda, passed out and in a coma from an overdose, apparently an accidental relapse but … we know better, and so does Cassie, who’s now more determined than ever to rat out Lambda as a human trafficking operation and Wendy as its pimp. Meanwhile Cassie has risen in the Lambda hierarchy enough to have her own room and to displace blonde bitch Monica (Tommi Rose) as the head of the Soc Committee, in which position she has to plan Lambda’s next big event, a masquerade ball (and anyone who’s seen Verdi’s opera Un Ballo in Maschera knows what sort of skullduggery can happen at a masked ball!). Cassie’s plot is to get Wendy up to an upstairs room from which the co-chairs of the Ethics Committee can hear her and Cassie agree that Cassie will give herself to Simon that night in exchange for his continued financial support of Lambda. The Ethics Committee chairs duly get the goods on Wendy and say she’s going to be fired immediately and referred to the police for criminal prosecution, but they also say they’re going to have to expel Cassie for having agreed to have sex with an alumnus in exchange for her own continued perks — whereupon Cassie reveals that the woman who actually got the goods on Wendy was not her but her identically dressed mother Debra (see, I told you it was going to be an important plot point that Cassie’s mom looked so young people mistook them for sisters!), who isn’t a student and therefore can’t be expelled.

Then Cassie approaches her age-peer boyfriend Charlie (Nikolai Soroko), who served as the bartender at all the Lambda parties even though he barely looks old enough to drink himself (though at least he’s not quite as anonymously blank-looking a twink type as the age-peer boyfriend in the Whittendale movies!), and says that now that the case is broken the two of them can go on “a real date” — only just then he’s stabbed in the back by a mysterious assailant who turns out to be Monica, who had begun as one of the sorority’s stars until she was assigned to be Cassie’s “big” (as in “big sister,” to show her the ropes of sorority life), only she hated Cassie because previously Monica had been the mistress of Simon Hughes, and he had even talked about divorcing his wife to marry her (yeah, right … ), until Cassie caught his eye at the sorority’s white party and he decided to dump Monica and make Cassie his latest sorority squeeze instead. It was Monica who murdered the two people who were going to rat out the sorority and gave Lois her hot shot, and of course she and Cassie have a big fight in which THEY BOTH REACH FOR THE KNIFE (whose blade director Romay gives us a lot of extreme close-ups of with Charlie’s blood still fresh upon it), only fortunately the campus police arrive in time to arrest Wendy while Monica takes a plunge out of the sorority window and falls to her death on the ground below. (Since it was only one floor up, it might have been better poetic justice if Monica had survived but ended up paralyzed and needing a wheelchair for the rest of her sorry life.)

Sorority Secrets doesn’t win any points for originality plot-wise but it’s quite an effective movie, putting its heroine through legitmate terror, and as he’s shown in some of his other Lifetime credits director Romay is good at creating a Gothic atmosphere even in contemporary settings (and pretty prosaic contemporary settings at that). Romay also gets fine performances from his cast, especially the villains — Tommi Rose is electrifying as Monica, especially in the scene in which she reveals that she was not born to money (as she’s been leading Cassie, the rest of Lambda and us to think), but realized early on that letting men have their way with her hot bod was the only way she was ever going to have the good things of the world she felt she deserved, while Marie Debrey as Wendy ably portrays the character’s self-delusion that pimping out the students in her charge to super-rich men is the way to maintain an institution and make sure it endures. At the end Cassie is shown leading a rally on campus designed to end sexual exploitation of sorority girls, and while that seems a bit beside the point it does make for a logical and satisfying ending to an unusually well-done Lifetime movie.