Sorority Girl

Susan Cabot stars as a spoiled rich college girl names Sabra. As an upperclassman she like to taunt and order about a fattish pledge named Ellie (Barbara Cowan), which irritates fellow student Rita (Barboura Morris). Sabra just seems to spread misery everywhere she goes.

Even a meeting with her mother (Fay Baker) leads to mama's tearing up Sabra's monthly allowance check. This just makes Sabra meaner and she eventually paddles Ellie and has a cat fight with Rita. When she learns that dopey Terry is pregnant, Sabra launches a plan to blackmail Mort (Dick Miller) and extort $1,000 from him by claiming he's the father.

Later on, at the beach, Terry goes into a funk and decides to jump off a cliff. Will anything save her?

Fay Baker is fun as the mean mama; everyone else is terrible. Cabot and Morris were also in THE WASP WOMAN together.

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.

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.

I didn't know what to expect before watching this movie. But with Susan Cabot's great performance as the main character Sabra Tanner I really enjoyed this old Roger Corman classic.

Sabra is well...not a nice person at all. She is spoiled rotten and rich and is being cut off from the family's money after her mother (Fay Baker) advises her of this. She is in a sorority, but tries to get the better in every situation she is in including blackmail, attempting to be romantically involved with roommate Rita's (Barboura Morris) man Mort played by Dick Miller and yes even spanking with a paddle one of the other sorority girls. It comes down to Cabot's performance though. She keeps things interesting and Corman keeps things at a brisk pace as the movie only runs just over an hour.

I expected this story (about a female sociopath in college) to be bad-good. Surprisingly it was just good! Susan Cabot gives a very strong performance in the lead. She shows the pain of the lead character who ruins people's lives but can't understand why. It's very short (60 minutes) and moves quickly. Not a hard-hitting expose on sociopaths--just an interesting little film about them. Worth watching.