Movie Review: Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama (1988)
I’m sure I’m not being profound when I say this is a strange movie. Its plot doesn’t really make any sense, and it’s impossibly silly. But, unlike much of director David DeCoteau’s work, it at least looks like a movie.
The movie starts with three nerds who decide to go spy on a sorority initiation. The sorority apparently only has three women in it, and two pledges. They are led by Babs (Robin Rochelle, The Slumber Party Massacre), who catches them when they are spying on a woman showering. As punishment, they have to aid Taffy (Brinke Stevens) and Lisa (Michelle Bauer) in their initiation, which involves breaking into a bowling alley inside the mall in order to steal something to prove they’ve been there. Babs and the two sorority sisters have a plan to sneak into the mall (owned by Babs’s father) to watch them on a security camera.
Inside the bowling alley, they meet Spider (Linnea Quigley, Return of the Living Dead), a punk girl who has broken in to rob the place. They steal a trophy and drop it, releasing a jive talking imp who calls himself Uncle Impy.
The imp promises to grant them each a wish, and one nerd wishes for gold, which he gets. Another nerd wishes to have sex with Lisa, and she’s suddenly in her lingerie ready for him. Taffy wishes to be prom queen for some reason, which seems like a weird wish for someone in college. Anyways, she gets a dress.
Calvin (Andras Jones, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master) and Spider don’t make any wishes, instead leaving. Calvin has a thing for Spider, who doesn’t give him the time of day. Linnea Quigley’s sarcastic performance is definitely one of the most enjoyable things about this movie.
The imp eventually reveals his true intentions, turning the gold to wood, and zapping the three sisters through the security camera so that Babs shows up in the bowling alley and the other two become demons — one dressed as the Bride of Frankenstein for some reason.
Babs tries to escape and they find they’re all trapped in the mall. One nerd gets beheaded, another gets boiled, and Taffy gets torn apart. One of the demons is shot but not killed, and when the imp corners Babs, Spider thinks she kills a demon by bowling it in the head. To counter, the imp turns Babs into a demon, which goes and kills Lisa, before Calvin kills it with a molotov cocktail.
Throughout the movie there has been the occasional interlude with the janitor, played by George “Buck” Flower. Eventually, Spider and Calvin meet him, and all the exposition in the movie is delivered in this scene, and it’s still somehow the most enjoyable scene. Flower is quite funny playing a mostly deaf character who keeps misunderstanding the last couple words people tell him, and going off on tangents based on that. He was aware of the imp, and says that it was held in that trophy because that contained its power.
After the Babs demon is killed, Spider and Calvin return to find that the janitor has been killed by the Bride of Frankenstein demon, who chases them with an axe in a scene that’s far more awkward than thrilling. There’s no music. Anyways, Spider decapitates it, and the head knocks the door open.
Calvin runs to get in the car, but is attacked by a demon in the backseat. Spider sneaks up from behind the imp and contains him in some kind of can just as Calvin wrecks the car. At daybreak, Calvin and Spider get aboard Spider’s motorcycle and head to her place, and the imp speaks directly to the audience.
This movie’s not as fun as it could be. There are a few moments I enjoy, but never has a decapitation been so boring. And the imp is painfully unfunny. He cracks jokes constantly, and they’re never any good. The movie keeps cutting to him with his little one-liners, and it’s just bad.
Linnea Quigley is pretty fun in her role, though, and I like Buck Flower’s part, though it’s barely more than a cameo.
With a bigger budget, this movie might have been something. It could have been Jim Wynorski’s Chopping Mall — a movie that takes place in a mall, has plenty of nudity and sex appeal, has a sense of humor, and some violent deaths. It’s not, though, and according to Wikipedia, it had about 1/10th the budget, so that may be why.
Rating: 2/10
