Sorority Row (2009)
Directed by Stewart Hendler
No — Sorority Row is not woke, scoring 17 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
A remake of a 1982 slasher about sorority sisters who bury a prank gone wrong, Sorority Row arrives with its moral ledger already balanced and its ambitions modest.
Consciousness Markers
The sorority ensemble includes Jamie Chung and a reasonably varied cast, but their diversity is incidental to a standard slasher body count and is never remarked upon.
A female-led slasher with a 'final girl' climax gestures at sisterhood and empowerment, but critics noted the subtext is thin and undercut by gratuitous nudity and objectification.
A campy, gory genre exercise with no preachy messaging; any thematic content is delivered as subtext rather than sermon.
No LGBTQ+ characters or themes appear anywhere in the film.
The film engages no racial themes or commentary whatsoever.
No environmental or climate content.
No economic or class critique; the villains are motivated by personal self-preservation, not systems.
The film leans on conventional slasher objectification rather than any body-positive messaging.
A guilt-ridden character and a psychiatrist appear, but mental state is used as plot mechanics, not as neurodivergence advocacy.
No historical revisionism; it is a contemporary slasher remake.
Why it received this score
A remake of a 1982 slasher about sorority sisters who bury a prank gone wrong, Sorority Row arrives with its moral ledger already balanced and its ambitions modest. Five young women conceal an accidental killing, then spend the back half of the running time being picked off by a hooded figure with a tire iron. The film knows this is thin material and mostly declines to pretend otherwise. There is gore, there is a house mother played by Carrie Fisher wielding a shotgun, and there is a body count that escalates with the mechanical punctuality of a metronome. Stewart Hendler directs with a slick, humorless efficiency, and the screenplay occasionally remembers it is supposed to be funny.
The cast is assembled with an eye toward variety that the script never bothers to notice. Jamie Chung appears among the sisters, and the ensemble is marginally more textured than the genre standard, though the film treats this as casting rather than commentary. Any gesture toward sisterhood arrives wrapped in the usual contradictions. Critics at the time observed a thin feminist undertow about loyalty and female solidarity, undercut almost immediately by gratuitous nudity and a camera that lingers where it should not. The empowerment is theoretical. The objectification is load-bearing. A guilt-ridden boyfriend and a psychiatrist drift through the proceedings, but mental distress functions here as plot machinery, not as advocacy of any kind. No racial themes surface. No environmental conscience stirs. The villain kills to protect his own future, which is a personal motive and not a systemic one, so there is no economic critique to extract.
What remains is a campy genre exercise that never lectures its audience. Whatever themes exist are buried as subtext beneath the fake blood, and the film seems content to leave them there. It was panned on release, grossed a modest sum, and has since acquired a small retrospective affection for its jokes. A sequel was announced in 2024, which suggests the appetite for this particular vintage has not fully expired.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
When five sorority girls inadvertently cause the murder of one of their sisters in a prank gone wrong, they agree to keep the matter to themselves and never speak of it again, so they can get on with their lives. This proves easier said than done, when after graduation a mysterious killer goes after the five of them and anyone who knows their secret.
Questions about Sorority Row
Is Sorority Row woke?
No — Sorority Row is not woke, scoring 17 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does Sorority Row have any woke elements?
1 of the 10 markers register at 30 or above, led by Representation Casting (30). On Representation Casting: The sorority ensemble includes Jamie Chung and a reasonably varied cast, but their diversity is incidental to a standard slasher body count and is never remarked upon.
How does Sorority Row compare to other 2009 movies?
It ranks #59 of the 230 films from 2009 we've scored; their average is 14. The wokest is Home (79).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.