The Row is a 2018 thriller about a college freshman trying to get into a sorority who discovers a dark secret about the house she’s pledging for after a series of murders terrorize the campus.
Well, kudos at least goes to a little subversion at the start of Matty Beckerman‘s otherwise obvious The Row, a by-the-books low budget sorority girls in danger flick that purposefully doesn’t play outside the lines, mixing its sexy shenanigans and seamy slaughter with B-movie bravado. It’s not like sexy girls in college as targets hasn’t had plenty of celloid devoted to their misadventures before, some dedicated entirely to their gruesome demise. It’s a tried and true recipe that have heaps of titles in the lot. So, now there’s one more.
Dropping off his beautiful and highly-intelligent daughter Riley (Lala Kent) at college, Detective Cole (Randy Couture) is naturally hesitant but trusts she’ll make the right choices. She’s drawn immediately into the party scene and a sorority that she learns her mother once pledged. She makes fast friends with a group of uninhibited girls who experiment with drugs, sex, and the fast life. All is right until one of them turns up murdered, stabbed repeatedly by a psycho who isn’t content with just one, a bit of a fetish in him having him turn his victims into dolls. Even though Cole’s not on the case, it doesn’t stop Riley’s dad from getting involved. There’s a madman on the loose, with Riley and her friends on his list.
Beginning with a quick farewell at the campus, the movie shifts from what seems like a standard girls gone wild movie to an action cop show, with Cole and his crew busting heads at a drug bust that goes horribly wrong. It’s a drawn out moment that might make you think you’re watching the wrong movie, but then at last, it gets back to the girls. Unfortunately, this is not nearly as compelling, with the film gleefully showcasing its young bountiful cast, though apparently cut for TV as all the fun is toned down and left to the imagination as the implied raunch never arrives. It’s just good looking girls in bikinis and low-cut tops giggling about between story elements. I mention this only because the film makes sure we notice.
Then there’s the horror. Our killer is a hooded, masked hissing sort of generic maniac on the loose whom we are supposed to guess could be any number of run-ins Riley has throughout the movie (though you most likely will know who it is the moment he’s introduced). His patterned stabby machinations are pretty much textbook stuff at this point as he collects girls and turns their dead bodies into weird stitched-together figurines. Somehow, this kind of slasher fiend feels about as dated as what the first Scream movie poked fun of more than twenty years ago.
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Where the movie does right is actually with Riley and her father, the film every so often showing a little heart and depth as the girl learns a few hard-knocked lessons along the way. Beckerman shows off some surprising deft here and there, making you wonder if he was trying to make a different movie.
I also appreciated more when the story sort of goes into detective mode, this stuff much more engaging, to a degree. Couture does his best as the concerned dad and dedicated detective, but the film is just too slight for its own good, never all that sexy and never ever scary, holding back on the reigns with no real nudity and no effective horror and wasting an opportunity to make Riley turn this into a more empowered finale. It’s like an off brand production of something that was popular decades before. Entirely disposable.