Secrets on Sorority Row (Penalty Vox, MarVista Entertainment,, Lifetime, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s Lifetime “premiere“ was of a surprisingly messy and dull movie called Secrets on Sorority Row, which I was expecting to be the sort of good clean dirty fun Lifetime often gives us whenever they put the words “cheerleader” or “sorority” in a movie title. Obviously these are the buzzwords Lifetime uses to draw straight male viewers to their channel by promising nubile young bodies in various states of scanty dress (or non-dress) and aliveness (or non-aliveness). Judging from the promos for it, I’m assuming tonight’s movie, Sorority Sister Killer, will be more like what I thought this one would be. The film starts with a prologue set in 1987 in which a young woman named Kelly Walsh (Holly Tatem) is being hazed by a rush party at the Theta Epsilon sorority house and, as part of the hazing ritual, is forced to drink an entire bottle of some clear alcoholic beverage (most likely either vodka or gin – we don’t see which because the bottle is unlabeled). She gets alcohol poisoning and falls down a flight of stairs in the house’s basement, collapses and dies. The other women running the sorority, including Michelle (Kristi McKenna), Myra (Nicole Marie Johnson) and Stacey (Lauren Buglioli), cover up the crime and claim that Kelly was drinking on her own outside the sorority and that’s why she had her drunken fall down the basement.

The film then contains a chyron reading, “22 Years Later” – which would be 2009 – and Michelle is now a psychology professor at the same college she attended way back when. Stacey is some sort of social figure married to a man named Chad (whom we never see) and she’s hyper-concerned that some busybody is going to unearth the secret of Kelly’s death from way back when and expose her, leading to the breakup of her marriage and presumably the loss of her social standing and her affluent lifestyle. Myra has gone through alcoholism and rehab over her guilt feelings about what happened 22 years earlier. Michelle’s daughter Quinn, whose dad left them and moved to Las Vegas to manage a casino (which given America’s twisted priorities probably means he’s making more than his ex is as a college teacher!), is going to college for one year under a deal with her mom that if she doesn’t like it, she can move to Vegas where her dad can get her a job dealing cards in a casino. Quinn is uncertain whether she wants to be in college at all, and especially whether she wants to be in her mom’s old sorority, but eventually she stumbles onto the story of Kelly’s death and the allegation that her spirit is still haunting the Epsilon house as a ghost. As yet another sorority prank the other girls in the sorority, including Bridget (Casey Weller), Gretchen (Milli M.) and Lucy (Taylor Hanks), lock Quinn in the basement – and she also collapses when she sees a light effect that looks like Kelly’s ghost.

The film then cuts back and forth between the two generations of Epsilon girls – the older ones are getting a series of crudely printed notes in all caps saying that their time is up, and in Michelle’s case the warning is aimed not only at her but her daughter Quinn as well. The younger ones are going through the usual sorority rituals, including a hazing that involves the so-called “trust walk,” in which the girls are blindfolded and forced to find their way back to the sorority house with only the voice of the house leader to guide them – only the girl who’s supposed to lead them back, Gretchen, is clubbed by one of Lifetime’s typical black-masked and hoodied assailants, so the girls have to doff their blindfolds and get back on their own. Meanwhile, the older women decide to hold a memorial event for Kelly at which they will announce what really happened to her, and Michelle fully intends to level with the crowd that Kelly died as the result of a dare as part of a hazing ritual, but Stacey takes the floor first and tells an even farther-from-the-truth lie that Kelly drank her fatal dose of liquor outside the sorority house, then crept back there and collapsed accidentally. Stacey frames it as a warning to the kids against underage drinking, but this arouses the ire not only of Michelle but also of Lucas (Andrew Ottolia), who’d been Kelly’s boyfriend until just before her death, when the sorority girls had made it clear they wouldn’t let Kelly joined if she stayed with a guy they considered a loser.

The heartbroken Lucas went on to become a ne’er-do-well and a petty criminal who had just got out of jail when all the notes started getting sent, and the older women make him their prime suspect until at the memorial Michelle asks Lucas to sign the guest book – and Lucas reveals he’s psychologically crippled and thus incapable of writing. Charles guessed that Lisa was going to be the villain who was making all this trouble for both generations of Epsilon girls, including sending the notes – and he turned out to be half right, though writer Scotty Mullen deserves points for thinking up an unusually creative motive. It turns out that before Lucas and Kelly broke up back in 1987, she had actually had a child by him but had given her up for adoption. The baby was named Miranda Lucinda Walsh, and she was raised by an abusive adoptive mother and became so bitter about everything that she sought out her real mother, found out what had happened to her, and decided to get her revenge by going to the same college and pledging the same sorority, where she’s known as “Lisa.” Only just as Lisa confesses to all this and Michelle tries to use psychology on her to turn herself in and get treated, Lisa is knocked unconscious and nearly killed by an initiation paddle wielded by … Stacey, who turns out to have actually murdered Kelly in 1987 by pushing her down the basement stairs. Directed by Dylan Vox – who also produced (through a company called “Penalty Vox” whose name is more creative than anything in this movie!) and played the minor role of a male professor at the college – Secrets on Sorority Row is surprisingly dull, and the cutbacks between the generations don’t amount to much – the only character with real pathos and depth is the alcoholic Myra, who under the stress of the reopened investigation has a relapse and crashes her car despite the warning of Michelle, whom she calls, that she shouldn’t be driving in her current state. Lauren Buglioli turns in a first-class performance as the bitch Stacey, but it’s not enough to save this movie from its excursion into all the dullest, worst Lifetime tropes.