Soon-to-be-soap-opera-babes graduate with a bang in the 1980s slasher classic THE HOUSE ON SORORITY ROW, making its third Blu-ray bow courtesy of MVD Visual's Rewind Collection.

After years as a housemother, Mrs. Slater (Lois Kelso Hunt) has decided to close up her house. Rather than loving her charges like a surrogate family, she has come to loathe them (which probably something to do with her difficult and tragic pregnancy in the 1961 black and white prologue). Unfortunately for her, the seven graduating girls of the Pi Theta sorority have decided to stay on to have one last fling. When Mrs. Slater catches alpha female Vicki (Eileen Davidson, TV’s THE YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS) and her boyfriend in the act and slashes her waterbed, Vicki decides that the end of the semester requires one more great prank before their passage into adulthood. Vicki borrows a gun loaded with blanks (and a real one to make things convincing), but apparently she miscounted because a bullet winds up in the housemother’s body and the body ends up in the swimming pool. Although sweet girl Katherine (Kathryn McNeil, SUDDEN DEATH) wants to call the police, Vicki convinces the other girls to hide the body since their party is only hours away. They submerge the corpse in the algae-filled pool and get on with the festivities, but the body won’t stay down… or dead apparently, because someone is stalking the girls one by one and creatively wielding Mrs. Slater’s cane as a weapon.

Writer/director Mark Rosman had grown up in Beverly Hills making 8mm shorts but did not get into UCLA’s film school his junior year. This prompted him to transfer to NYU, where he wound up working on the crew of Brian De Palma’s HOME MOVIES – made after his theatrical hit CARRIE but crewed with students from his alma mater Sarah Lawrence College – as first assistant director. Not a fan of horror movies, Rosman set out to make a Hitchcockian thriller under the guise of a slasher film. Other than a less-than-comic treatment of the hiding the body that turns up in inconvenient places aspect, THE HOUSE ON SORORITY ROW is an enjoyably derivative slasher with a dash of DIABOLIQUE; albeit one with an emphasis on stalking rather than slashing with much of the murders taking place off-screen or with restrained use of make-up effects (although one victim’s head is discovered in a toilet in a bit somewhat reminiscent of the fate of one of the victims in the Canadian slasher CURTAINS).

McNeil makes a fetching and sympathetic final girl, although she is easily talked out of all of her attempts to do the right thing. Davidson’s Vicki overshadows her with some soap opera-ready bitchiness (of the seven sorority sisters, only Katherine and Vicki are clearly characterized). Although Vicki doffs her top early on, the killer has better reasons to go after her than loose morals, as Rosman has her scream to Mrs. Slater “I’ll get back at you if it’s the last thing that I do!” Hunt’s performance is difficult to assess since she was redubbed, but visually she conveys both a sense of loss and bitterness nicely (although it is a fault of the script that we really have no idea how different her behavior during the film proper from the previous four years with the girls).

Just as a Pittsburgh-shot film of the time was bound to have a few George Romero alums and a Michigan film might have a few Sam Raimi crew members, the Baltimore, Maryland-lensed THE HOUSE ON SORORITY ROW features a couple John Waters regulars behind the camera (Waters also reportedly visited the set) like production designer Vince Peranio (PINK FLAMINGOS) and production manager Robert Maier who did sound work on some of Waters’ early films. In front of the camera was Baltimore band 4 Out of 5 Doctors performing five of their songs during the party scenes (although they did not appear onscreen, two of the band’s songs were also heard in Ulli Lommel’s THE BOOGEYMAN). Rachael Talalay, director of FREDDY’S DEAD: THE FINAL NIGHTMARE and GHOST IN THE MACHINE (produced by this film’s assistant director Paul Schiff), served as script supervisor and apprentice editor. A handful of people with the surname Rosman get special thanks in the end credits, which makes sense since Rosman cops to borrowing $7500 from his orthodontist uncle.

The film was picked up by Edward L. Montoro’s Film Ventures and released by its sister company Artists Releasing Corporation. Montoro provided the production with $125,000 of finishing funds, which included inserts shot inside Rosman’s parents’ home, added gore effects by MADMAN's Rob Holland and RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD's Kenny Myers – who also played a party-guest-cum-victim because they already had a cast of his head – the sound mix, and the film’s most impressive element: the orchestral score of Richard H. Band – brother of Empire Pictures/Full Moon producer Charles Band – as performed by The London Philharmonic Orchestra. Taking off from Rosman’s temp track score of Pino Donaggio and Bernard Herrmann cues, Band composed a rich, lyrical main title theme well-suited to Rosman’s Hitchcockian thriller ambitions. Band also provided a music box melody, variations of which are heard throughout the score, eventually weaving its way into the end credits version of the main theme. The score was released on CD in 1993 by Intrada paired with Band’s elegant score for Charles Band’s THE ALCHEMIST.

THE HOUSE ON SORORITY ROW first arrived on VHS in the United States courtesy of Vestron Video in a slipcover edition that preserved Montoro’s misleading poster design with the rape-revenge tagline "Nothing can prepare you for what happens when she fights back" (a videocassette release from Duravision titled HOUSE OF EVIL featuring the credits for this film actually contained Gus Trikonis’ 1978 film THE EVIL). The first DVD release was during the glory days of Elite Entertainment in 2000 in an anamorphic transfer with the memorable theatrical trailer as the only extra. Ten years later, Liberation Entertainment put out a twenty-fifth anniversary edition with a 5.1 remix and special features; however, that edition went out of print very quickly for reasons unknown. Scorpion Releasing followed it up with a two-disc DVD special edition carrying over the extras along with several new ones of their own. The Scorpion transfer boasted of a brand new HD-mastered transfer from the original internegative, and that master would make its way to a two-disc Blu-ray edition in 2016 with the feature, commentaries, and an extended interview with Kozak on a BD25 Blu-ray disc and interviews with Davidson, McNeil, Rosman, Band, and producer Igo Kantor on a bonus DVD.

While the previous transfer was nice, Scorpion evidently decided to up the game with a new one after rights owner Multicom licensed the previous master to 88 Films in the UK with a newer transfer in 2018 for a limited edition single-disc BD50 edition that ported over all of the extras and added a 5.1 remix from the original 3-track magnetic elements. That master has been ported over to MVD's Rewind Collection Blu-ray which includes two presentations: the theatrical version with tinted prologue, and the director-approved version from the Scorpion release with black and white prologue. Both feature the same 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.78:1 widescreen transfer which looks more vibrant than the 2016 Blu-ray. Some finer detail does bring out the rough edges of the production like a shot of the figure lurking in the basement behind a discarded shutter door confirming that the stalker is not Mrs. Slater. Unfortunately, the 5.1 remix has not been ported over with the theatrical version including a stereo downmix of the 5.1 track in LPCM 2.0 while the director-approved cut includes the original mono mix in lossy Dolby Digital 2.0. Only the theatrical version includes SDH subtitles. The theatrical version opens with Multicom's logo while the director-approved version includes the original Artists Releasing Corporation logo.

Carried over from the Liberation disc and the Scorpion DVD and earlier Blu-rays is an audio commentary track featuring actresses McNeil and Davidson with director Rosman. The entertaining track has the three reminiscing about the shoot, poking good-natured fun at themselves, their co-stars (particularly Jodi Draigie's memorably bad line reading), and the film. Rosman recalls that the pair of squatters in the house location ended up working the video assist which was more of a luxury than the cherry picker used for the film's rare crane moves, as well as in-camera effects during Katherine’s hallucinations (the surreal shot of the head in the toilet opening its eyes was actually an outtake of the actress resting between takes). In between the banter, Rosman works in a lot of details about the shooting and post-production (he wanted the opening prologue to be noirish black-and-white, but the distributors had it tinted because they feared that the audience would walk out if they thought it was a monochrome film, and the title was changed from SEVEN SISTERS so the audience would not think it was a film about nuns).

From the Scorpion DVD and Blu-rays comes a newer audio commentary track with director Rosman moderated by Katarina Leigh Waters. There is quite a lot of overlap between the two tracks, but the new track is the less entertaining one without the presences of McNeil and Davidson. On the other hand, it is a more focused and organized track, with Rosman responding to Waters’ prompting whenever he slows down. Anecdotes and details that arose randomly in the previous track usually correspond to the onscreen action here. With Davidson and McNeil represented on the commentary track, they also received shorter video interviews ported over from the Scorpion discs in which McNeil (14:22) also describes her experience working with George Romero on MONKEY SHINES and how her casting was contingent on how much weight she could lose after having had her first child, as well as her degree in special education and working with children, and Davidson (7:12) discusses her subsequent soap opera career on DAYS OF OUR LIVES and THE YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS, her mystery writing career, and attending the premiere for the remake with McNeil.

Also ported over from the Scorpion releases is an extended video interview with actress Kozak (41:35) in which the actress reminisces on her first acting job, the uncomfortable conditions, as well as being submerged in the pool for the “discovery of the bodies” scene. She recalls seeing the film theatrically in a skuzzy neighborhood theater and noticing that Hunt’s entire performance had been redubbed and also tells us that co-star Robin Meloy is a pianist and author. When asked to comment on the remake, she remarks on the “Swine Flu-inducing” handheld camerawork and the lack of likable characters, particularly the males in the film (Kovak was asked to pen an essay on the film and remake for the book BUTCHER KNIVES AND BODY COUNTS, which came out from Dark Scribe Press in August 2011). The first twenty-odd minutes are devoted specifically to the film, with the remainder focusing on her film and TV career (including the extremely unrewarding experience of working on Sidney J. Furie’s THE TAKING OF BEVERLY HILLS, as well as THE FAVOR with then-unknown Brad Pitt) as well as her more recent work as a novelist. Waters interviews director Rosman on camera (22:21) and there quite a bit of overlap with the commentary track (including the Brian De Palma/HOME MOVIES anecdotes and his subsequent more family friendly film fare like the “William & Kate” TV movie). He also does not hold back in his distaste for the advertising campaign, the tagline of which suggests that it is a rape-revenge film.

Two more interviews from the Scorpion releases are also included. Composer Richard Band (45:14) recalls that he was selected by Kantor because he had already scored John “Bud” Cardos’ THE DAY TIME ENDED, and discusses in-depth his conception of the individual themes he conceived for the film and how they interacted with one another. He describes his working methods, including coming up with hundreds of pages of music editing notes in conjunction with the director before going off on his own. Band mentions that Rosman was the initial director of Film Ventures’ MUTANT, his next scoring assignment (which was finished by Cardos). He also relays some of the rumors he heard about Montoro’s disappearance. About half-way through the interview, he moves on to discussing his experiences in Europe with his producer father Albert Band (ZOLTAN: HOUND OF DRACULA) as a kid, and touring with rock bands before attending music school in the states before discussing his other scoring assignments, including DR. HECKYL AND MR. HYPE, PARASITE, TIME WALKER (“I just remember the mummy on skates!”), METALSTORM for Universal (which he had to compose and record in eleven days with a full orchestra and five synthesizers), and his Empire Pictures credits.

In his interview (10:10), post-production supervisor Igo Kantor – mislabeled in the menu here as "composer" – discusses his position as in-house producer, post production supervisor, and music editor for Film Ventures. Montoro’s confidence in Kantor was such that he simply gave Kantor money and told him to go to South Africa and shoot a sequel to their successful pick-up KILL OR BE KILLED. It was Kantor’s idea to take Band to England to conduct the film’s score with the London Philharmonic, which he apparently did for other Film Ventures composers like John Williams, Dominic Frontiere and Stu Phillips. Of the film’s editing, Kantor claims to have only tightened up some bits during the climax. Kantor also adds that he believes Montoro – who disappeared after Film Ventures went bankrupt – is in Mexico.