Sorority Girl

Stunning Susan Cabot is Sabra, a troubled young woman indeed. Despised by her mother and hated by her sorority sisters, Sabra has plenty of dough but no friends and nothing but hatred for the world and everybody in it, including herself. She tortures the poor chubby li'l pledge that has been assigned to her as a "little sister", at one point even giving her *gasp* a good spanking! Events soon spiral out of her control, though, and her slippery slope of loathing soon leads her to blackmail, extortion, and revenge. And when I say "soon", I mean "soon", because the whole darn movie is only 60 minutes long! I like SORORITY GIRL a lot. In addition to Miss Cabot (who gives her best performance ever here, despite the fact that at age 30 she was a little long-in-the-tooth to be a sorority girl), you'll find Barboura Morris (the sexiest of all '50s AIP starlets, in this guy's opinion), June Kenney (well remembered from ATTACK OF THE PUPPET PEOPLE), and the ubiquitous Dick Miller (somewhat surprisingly playing a character not named Walter Paisley).

Roger Corman said that AIP presented him with the script and asked him to make the picture quickly and cheaply (no surprise there); Corman was used to being involved in his screenplays, so he worked on it as quickly as he could while filming commenced. He shot the picture at the USC campus and rented, rather than built on a set, the sorority house, to accomplish maximum frugality. It gives the film a nice college atmosphere (watch the cast hanging out at USC landmarks just to show they were really on campus).

The film's hour running time allows for no humor, and suspense builds nicely to the picture's climax. (I shouldn't say NO humor; look for the lamps in Sabra's room: they are ballerina legs with tutus for shades!) In the end, when all of the sorority sisters finally confront Sabra on the beach ("You're not human – you're something the SEA cast up!") I actually felt sorry for the poor little sociopath.

SORORITY GIRL originally played as a double-feature with MOTORCYCLE GANG, and that film is also recommended.

This is one of my all-time favorite movies. It's a masterpiece. I think Susan Cabot is right up there with Faye Dunaway in "Mommie Dearest," and Lili Taylor in "I Shot Andy Warhol" in her role as Sabra. I think anyone with any damned sense can see him/herself in this young woman. Call me disturbed, or twisted, but that's just the way it is. The scenes with Sabra & her mother are priceless, as are the interactions (and altercations!) between Sabra & Rita, her roommate. It's hard to believe Corman made this film in 1956; it holds up so well. If you miss this, you are missing out on life itself.

This is another of those young people who go wrong movies that were so popular from the mid-fifties to mid-sixties, all trying in their own way to be another "Rebel Without a Cause", and few succeeding.

This one didn't succeed either, but it can still hold your interest, as you find yourself alternating between wanting to throttle the main character and feeling sorry for her.

The movie could have been titled "Lost Cause", as she seems doomed from the start, a girl rich in material things but poverty stricken when it comes to love and affection, none of which her widowed socialite mother is willing or able to give her. She takes her unhappiness out on the girls in her college sorority, and all her cruelty, scheming, and blackmailing backfire on her.

If you're looking for a happy ending, you won't find it here.

If you're looking for a great movie, you won't find that either.

If you're looking for something to kill time, you've come to the right place (I guess).

Whether playing Charles Bronson's tough moll in MACHINE GUN KELLEY or a beauty queen mogul turned monstrous WASP WOMAN, Susan Cabot was b-movie director Roger Corman's greatest leading lady, combining a raw, formidable prowess with brooding melancholy, often within the same character...

With dark hair and full lips, she was pretty, even beautiful, but only when she needed to be... until morphing into a bitter scowl as intense as any comparably well-known character actress...

But in Corman's SORORITY GIRL, she's simply too old for the title poor-rich-girl role, manipulating her college roommates who are actually the correct age... overall seeming more like a jealous young den mother...

Initially her most bullied victim (both emotionally and physically) is stacked ugly duckling Barbara Cowan: yet their scenes needed to be amplified and progressed... they would have probably shared homoerotic/top/bottom aspects had this been a 1970's exploitation...

Also starring regular Corman good-girl Barboura Morris, underused as a moral compass, Cabot's most vulnerable victim is Corman and fellow b-auteur Bert I. Gordon's lithe blonde-beauty June Kenney, secretly pregnant while working at Dick Miller's campus beer-hall, shown only in the first and final act...

Which has her 11th hour suicide attempt injecting suspenseful melodrama that SORORITY GIRL, the movie and the character, needed more of - to make this more of an intense thriller, which the moodily energetic Cabot seems otherwise primed for.

Sorority Girl is a fairly high quality teen soap opera from the 1950s. An Elizabeth Taylor wanna be is the meanest mean girl alive (seriously, we are talking personality disorder here) and she bullies a younger college freshman who is a little awkward and fuller figured, but mostly too nice for her own good. A smart girl with a hairstyle that makes her look like they somehow imported her in a time machine from 1987 tries to put an end to it all, but also finds herself foiled.

Spoiler alert: there's absolutely nothing poor about the poor little rich girl, she is just a monster.