It really says something about a movie’s plot that if only the main characters were a little bit sterner in their moral fibre, then the whole story of the film would have rendered moot. Sorority Row has a simple lesson at its heart: don’t cheat on your sorority sister girlfriend because her BFFs will take you out into the desert where you’ll kill her not knowing that her “accidental drug overdose” was just a prank while they pretended to look for somewhere to hide “the body.”

Now urban legends are rife with tales of pranks gone awry, so it’s good material, but there’s a scant line of dialogue that throws this whole premise into disrepute. As the boyfriend (Matt O'Leary), in mid-meltdown, fumbles for the tire iron, the sisters whisper about how their plan is progressing. The more conscientious of the sisters Cassidy (Briana Evigan) thinks that things may have gone just far enough, but Queen Bee Jessica (Leah Pipes) firmly comes from the Karl Rove school of warfare: complete decimation. After all, Garrett had sex with another girl behind dear Megan’s back. “But didn’t you cheat on him first?” innocently asks Claire (Jamie Chung).

Bingo!, as another zero-sum badass from that Nazi movie a few weeks ago might say. Now that kind of blatant hypocrisy may occasionally win you the White House while travelling in Washington power circles, but it’s a sure-fire recipe to get you killed in horror movies. Also, speaking of things that can get you killed, thinking that you can just cover something up as easy as dumping the body and having done with it is rarely so quick and easy. But then again it worked so well for the clean cut, twentysomething teens of I Know What You Did Last Summer…

So the recipe is simple: five sorority sisters, one big secret, graduation night party, and a psycho revenge killer on the loose with a Swiss army tire iron. You watch with neither pity nor righteousness as the girls and assorted bystanders get killed in horrible ways. Perhaps in this, Sorority Row finds a niche as a post-modern horror film slasher because you have reason to feel nothing but revulsion for these girls and revel in their horrible demises, but sadly you get nothing, except maybe bored waiting for the film to reveal which of the two most likely suspects is the actual killer.

Boredom is mixed with tedium as the girl’s vainly try to use their deductive reasoning to figure out who knows their secret and who’s using it to exact revenge. Naturally, the sluttiest girls are the first to go, along with one horn dog frat boy that’s all to willing to trade wristbands for the seniors party to some freshmen girls if they’ll flash him their trash. (Smartly, they decline… eventually.) For dramatics’ sake, the bitchiest of the sisters meets her maker last, as the two that struggle the most with the dubious morality of getting their housemate accidentally killed, dumping the body and perpetuating a cover up, get to barely escape.

I might have felt bad too if the actress playing the murdered girl hadn’t been one the degenerate bobbleheads of that odious MTV reality show The Hills. The only person I was sorry to see go was Carrie Fisher playing a sawed-off toting house mother who warns the killer off be telling him she lives in a house with 50 “crazy bitches” so she can handle a guy with a tire iron (and then she’s killed). But really a guy with cloak and a modified tire iron ain’t actually that scary, and of course there’s the zero caring factor in relation to the film’s victims that further undermines an already flimsy premise. Unfortunately, this Sorority is not even as scary as a real-life, non-murderous sorority.