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Amazingly, a movie that stars Queen Latifah, Phylicia Rashad and Alfre Woodward feels extremely low budget, badly acted and really dull.

Why this remake exists is beyond me. As opposed to the original, which was cast with white actresses, this movie has a predominantly black cast. That's the only real difference, and nothing is done with it. You might think middle to upper class black women in the South might have a different perspective on life than middle to upper class white women. This is never explored. Instead, you get mostly a line for line remake performed by a bunch of actors who at times seem bored, listless or like they wish they were in a different movie. It's almost a circumstance where you need to watch the original movie in order to learn anything about the characters or why they behave the way they do. I would say the only reason to see this movie is an example of how not to remake a popular film.

Watching Babylon, you can't help but think of Singin' In the Rain (the movie even has a character watch that film as the movie is ending). Both movies cover how Hollywood and its actors dealt with the changeover from silent films to talking pictures. That is where the similarities end. Where Singin' in the Rain is a classic, Babylon is a bloated mess. This is the kind of film that thinks it needs to show a woman urinating all over a naked man during sex in the middle of a wild party during the first ten minutes in order to let the audience know how hedonistic the atmosphere was in mid-1920s Hollywood. Scenes that could have gone 5 minutes, last 20. Half the characters look like they haven't bathed in weeks. And finally, the performances are all over the place. If only the director had been reigned in, and an editor with extensive experience had been allowed to make cuts, you might have had a serviceable film. Instead you get a mess that is killed by its own self indulgence.

Ricki and the Flash is a hard movie. It's what happens when you have a lot of great actors working with a "meh" script. The plot is relatively simple. Ricki is a middle aged professional musician by night, grocery store cashier by day, living in California. Years, if not decades before, she essentially cut her family in Indianapolis loose to follow her music dreams. She gets a call that her daughter is in distress and returns back to the Midwest to the mess she left behind. Her family veers from indifferent to openly hostile in response to her return, but she does manage to help her daughter somewhat. Following that, she returns to California and tries to get her life together enough to attend her son's wedding, which she does attend and some reconciliation occurs.

There are significant problems with this movie. Ricki comes off as oblivious and self-centered when it comes to the damage her leaving has done to her kids. She has political views which seem to exist solely to cause conflict. Early in the movie we see she's estranged from her children to the point where her oldest son has hidden the fact that he is engaged to his girlfriend. Despite, this, the movie moves to the reconciliation phase between everyone without doing much, if any of the hard work of having the characters confront their issues with one another, making the end feel unearned. Finally, while it is not addressed in the movie, Audra McDonald is more than two decades younger than Kline and Streep, and is much closer in age to the actors playing their adult children than to them. This kind of short circuits her attempts to assert parental authority over Streep during the movie.

My Salinger Year is a sweet, delightful film, and you do not need to have read the book to enjoy it. The plot is fairly thin. In the mid-90s, Joanna (Margaret Qualley) visits a friend in New York, and decides to stay there, leaving her life in California behind. What Joanna would really like to do is write, but she also has to pay the bills. She gets a job as an assistant at a literary agency, working for Sigourney Weaver. The catch here is Weaver's biggest client is J. D. Salinger, the famously reclusive writer. He gets hundreds of letters from fans, but the agency has been instructed not to pass them on, and instead respond to each letter with a form indicating that Mr. Salinger will never see it. Despite this, Joanna begins personally responding to certain letters with unintended results. Also, Joanna picks up a mediocre boyfriend, ponders life and following a tragedy involving her boss, gains the courage to move to the next stage of her life.

Overall, this was an enjoyable movie. There was no particular deep meaning to any of it, and you might say the movie relies a little too heavily on the Salinger gimmick. However, Qualley is wonderfully engaging in her role, and Sigourney Weaver is clearly living her best life. The movie has a nice supporting cast as well. I'd very much recommend it for a rainy day or a movie night.

Martha Marcy May Marlene is a hard film to watch. Nominally, the story follows Martha as she escapes from the cult she has been living with for two years and makes contact with her estranged sister. Her sister takes her in to stay at she and her husband's lake house. As Martha tries to settle into her new surroundings, she she has difficultly re-acclimating. She flashes between the past and present. We see Martha's life in the cult, how she is initiated, and how things progress from bad to worse. Meanwhile, she also acts inappropriately around her sister and her husband by swimming nude, crawling into bed with them while they have sex and freaking out during a dinner party. The movie ends ambiguously as Marcy is being driven to a psychiatric facility.

This movie is best described as a flawed with an interesting premise. Elizabeth Olsen is excellent, but the storyline and characters are poorly developed. You certainly see how Martha is lured into the cult, the cult leader's charm and how she is groomed for every next step the cult takes to ensure her loyalty. However, Martha's sister, Lucy, and her husband are next to useless. They spend most of the film asking Martha what is wrong with her, but seem only somewhat interested in finding out what has been going on with Martha for the two years she has been missing. I was also confused by one of the initial scenes where a cult member confronts Martha at a diner, but she seemingly is allowed to leave, despite our later finding out just how important it is that the cult get Martha back under their control. As I said, it's a flawed movie, but an interesting premise.

The Chaperone is a perfectly pleasant film that has very little to say and is mostly forgettable. The movie is told in flashback. Nominally, this movie is about Norma Carlisle, a married society woman from Wichita who impulsively decides to chaperone Louise Brooks (the future silent film star) on a trip to New York City when Brooks is 15 in 1922. Carlisle has her own agenda for New York involving finding her birth mother, and Louise is quite wild. However, the two eventually develop an understanding and get along after some initial problems. Carlisle also finds romance and becomes more empowered in her own life. The movie then returns to its present, 1942, when Brooks is a washed up film star, teetering on the edge of complete ruin. Carlisle gives her a pep talk and sends Brooks on her way back to New York. The movie then ends with a title card which significantly downplays how tragic Brooks' life ended up being. (Essentially, she became an alcoholic sex worker who lived much of her later adult life in abject poverty.)

Overall, the acting in the film is perfectly serviceable. McGovern is fine, the actress playing Brooks is fine. There's just not much here to recommend.

The best thing The Mothers-in-Law has going for it are the comic stylings of Eve Arden and Kaye Ballard. The actresses have great timing, good chemistry and liven up an otherwise dull show.

For me, the main problem of The Mothers-in-Law is that even for the late 60s, the show seems dated and stale. As the show goes on, you start to feel as if every episode is a variation of: "Kaye and Eve are told not to engage in a certain activity. They then proceed to engage in that activity. Wacky hi-jinks ensue." It's essentially a retread of I Love Lucy, which makes sense, given this show involved a lot of the same writing staff as Lucy. However, what seemed fresh and clever in the early 1950s is less appealing nearly twenty years later.

I would say you should watch this show mostly as a curiosity. It's entertaining, but nothing all that memorable.

Woman in Gold tells the true story of Maria Altmann's quest, aided heavily by Randol Schoenberg, to retrieve a famed Gustav Klimt painting of her aunt, which was owned by her family before being stolen by the Nazis.

This is a movie that only works at all because of Helen Mirren. She is excellent, and telegraphs all the losses Maria faced in Austria during the Holocaust, and why this painting holds such deep meaning for her. A scene towards the end of the film where she returns to her old Austrian home, and walks through moments in her life as a way of making peace with the past is very moving. The best that can be said for Ryan Reynolds is that he tries, but he is miscast at best in the role of Schoenberg. He is wrong for this movie, and frankly, drags down scenes that are supposed to show his struggles as he tries to move Altmann's court case.

In all, I would say watch this movie for Mirren, and grit your teeth when watching Reynolds.

Hello, My Name is Doris is a movie that seemingly has no idea what it wants to say. Doris Miller (Sally Field) is a 60-something woman who spent a good portion of her adult life caring for her recently deceased mother. Doris has a mundane job in Manhattan full of people who largely ignore her. Her remaining family wants to help her break her hoarding habit and sell her mother's home. After she and a friend attend a self-help book reading, Doris decides to romantically pursue her much younger boss, John. Doris goes about this by essentially stalking John via his Facebook page. She creates situations where she can unexpectedly interact with him, and they end up becoming friends. Doris inadvertently causes John's girlfriend to dump him, and John and Doris grow closer. Doris misconstrues John's comments to her, and confesses her actions in causing his break up, leaving John repulsed. Doris then takes this moment, and uses it to take steps to move on with her life. The ending of the movie leaves Doris and John's relationship on a cliffhanger.

I will say this. Sally Field is excellent in this movie. She uses her charm and personality to breathe life into her character that may not have worked with other actresses. The rest of the cast is also excellent, and there are a lot of extremely good actors attached to this movie.

Having now complemented Ms. Field and the cast, I have to say the movie is very uneven. It's suggested during the movie that Doris may be seriously mentally ill. She has a terrible hoarding habit. She stalks her co-worker, and at times seems to have trouble staying in reality. This is all kind of glossed over with a montage. It's suggested during the movie that Doris seriously resents her brother, but again, this is mostly resolved via montage. The ending also leaves us with the idea that cyber-stalking is the best way to get yourself a love interest, which isn't the best message to send. Overall, I really enjoyed the cast of this movie, and would recommend it. I just would warn the viewer not to expect much.

In the movie Sunset Boulevard, the character of Norma Desmond spends a good portion of the movie hard at work on a script that is eventually described as terrible and un-filmable once it is complete. I like to think Sextette is the film she was working on.

I will say this, even if you are the kind of person who has built a shrine to Mae West in your home, this movie should give you pause. 80-something Mae West plays a version of herself named "Marlo Manners." Ms. Manners is an international film star/sex symbol who has just arrived in London following her marriage to a 30-something Timothy Dalton. International intrigue abounds (Ms. Manners is naturally a skilled diplomat), along with some eye opening "musical numbers" that consist of the cast dancing around Mae West, who barely looks able to sway side to side in a consistent fashion.

Sextette is a campy delight, but it's also just really sad. Watching the movie, I think there is a real question as to how lucid Mae West was at this point in her life. She doesn't seem entirely aware of where she is, and her line readings are, at best, confused. Aside from those issues, the movie itself is just a bizarre vanity project for a faded film star who was still doing the same shtick in 1978 that she had been doing since the early 1900s. Overall, it's an interesting movie to watch, but also serves as a warning about knowing when to say "no" to a project.

Still Alice tells the story of Alice, a linguistics professor at Columbia who notices that she appears to be losing her memory. This culminates in a moment of panic for her during a run when she seemingly forgets where she is, despite being in a place she regularly frequents. At that point, she visits a neurologist and it is revealed she has early onset Alzheimer's. The rest of the movie shows us her steady loss of self as her memory continues fading at a rapid clip.

This movie lives and dies with Julianne Moore. She is sensational in the role of Alice, and shows us all the little losses Alice suffers as she eventually fades to nothing. Her performance is such that she manages to carry the entire movie. The problem with this film lies with everything else. Alice's husband, played by Alec Baldwin, is essentially an empty vessel. He shows that he cares about Alice, but we are given little insight into him or what he is thinking. Kristen Stewart is slightly more developed as Alice's youngest daughter, with whom Alice has a difficult relationship, but eventually rallies to her mother's side. The other actors are given nothing to do. For example, in one scene we learn that Alice's oldest daughter has the same gene Alice does and will likely develop Alzheimer's at an early age like her mother. This plot point leads nowhere. It's mentioned once and never discussed again. Alice also has a son, but again, he is given nothing to do. He could have been cut from the film, and literally nothing would be different. It's all very disappointing.

Overall, I would say, see this movie for Julianne Moore, and just grit your teeth through the rest.

The One I Love plays out like an extended episode of The Twilight Zone, which is both its strength and weakness. The plot is relatively simple, and plays for the first half of the film like a romantic comedy. A couple whose relationship is slowly breaking down is sent by their therapist for a weekend retreat. On that retreat, they meet idealized versions of themselves, and for a time, it appears they are a bridge to help the couple rekindle their romance. The movie then takes a more sinister turn as it becomes clear the "idealized" version of the couple is not what they seem.

The acting is very well done. Both Elisabeth Moss and Mark Duplass have a nice chemistry and convincingly play two versions of the same character. The weakness of the movie goes back to what I said about this movie playing like an extended version of a Twilight Zone episode. It feels as though there was simply not enough material here to really sustain the approximately hour and a half running time. There are points where the film drags, and very little happens. The movie could have been sharper as a shorter film. Overall though, it was a decent little film.

Chef is a movie that reeks of what former Washington Post writer Lisa DeMoraes called "male pattern optimism." Male pattern optimism is when in a TV show or movie, a mostly average looking actor ends up with a ridiculously good looking actress cast as his wife and/or girlfriend. In this case, you have Jon Favreau who gets to be with both Scarlett Johansson and Sofia Vergara over the course of the movie.

The movie itself is nothing spectacular. Favreau plays a chef who is more concerned with his food than his son. A bad review, followed by a social media blunder of epic proportions leads to the chef losing his job. The chef's ex-wife then sets him up to be his own boss with a food truck, and he and his son bond over a road trip from Florida to California. The movie is slow at points, and somewhat contrived, but largely inoffensive. At times, you may feel as if you are watching an ad for a certain social media company.

There are a lot of big names in the cast, but they are mostly wasted in cameos or roles where they are given little to do. This is not by any means a bad movie, it just suffers mostly from wasted potential and the feeling that it is going nowhere.

Admission is a movie that you wish was better than it actually is. It has a likable, talented cast, but a protagonist that would be described as an emotional wreck whose inability to separate her professional and private life has devastating results.

Tina Fey plays Portia Nathan, a Princeton admissions officer who seemingly has her life together, living happily childless with her long term boyfriend. Things begin to fall apart when said boyfriend dumps Portia for another woman he has impregnated. Portia then meets John Pressman (Paul Rudd) who further upends her life with the news that one of his students, Jeremiah, may be the child Portia gave up for adoption years before, and could she help him with his Princeton admission. John also becomes a love interest for Portia. Portia becomes attached to both John and Jeremiah which leads to an emotionally charged destruction of her professional life.

Admission is not a bad movie. It is not a good movie. It is somewhere on the spectrum between below average and average. At times, it seems like it wants to be a rom-com, at other times, it seems like it is a much more highly charged drama. It also feels like Paul Rudd and Tina Fey should have good chemistry together, but they just do not. Lily Tomlin is pretty good in her role, though, so there is that. Overall, I would say it makes for generally pleasant viewing, just do not go in expecting much.

Friends with Kids is a movie that should be very good, but ends up falling somewhere around slightly above average.

The premise is rather simple. After seeing their friends have children and watching their relationships be seriously tested, two best friends (Scott and Westfeldt) decide to have a baby together to avoid what they see as the destructive force that a baby has on a marriage. At first, they claim the relationship will be strictly platonic, but then the movie turns into a romantic comedy and you know what ends up happening.

There are a few very good moments in Friends with Kids. When Jon Hamm calls out Jason and Julie for what he sees as their not taking having a child seriously, it's a good moment. When you see relationships fall apart and friendships end, those are good moments because there is a realism to them. Further, the movie is well cast, and the actors all work very well together, excepting Megan Fox, but that may be intentional in terms of her character.

The bad moments are when the movie is unwilling to avoid being a silly romantic comedy. You don't need to watch the second half of the movie because you know what is going to happen in terms of the relationship between the two protagonists. It's that predictable, and it ultimately hurts the movie quite a bit. So while I would recommend seeing the film, I would just warn you ahead of time to be ready for where it goes.

Oliver's Story is a movie in desperate need of a purpose. Oliver, still grieving for Jenny after her death, refuses to move on with his life, despite nearly two years having passed since she died. He throws himself into his work helping the poor and rebuffs his friends' efforts to set him up with new people.

By chance he meets Marcie Bonwit (Candice Bergen), an heiress to the Bonwit Teller Department Store fortune. They get together, he seems to loosen up and enjoy himself, but Oliver is held back by his guilt over Jenny. Eventually Marcie tires of feeling as if she is competing with a dead woman, and breaks things off. In the background, are Oliver's father's efforts to get him to take over the family business and accept the responsibility that comes with being in the family. Somehow the break up of his relationship with Marcie inspires Oliver to finally move on with his life and accept his place as a WASP.

There are so many problems with this movie. The biggest issue is that Bergen and O'Neal have very little chemistry, and their relationship feels forced and pointless. She is like the anti-Jenny to the point she is telling Oliver to revel in his wealth. The other big issue is the total lack of a storyline. Oliver spends most of the movie moping, gets together with Marcie, mopes some more and then reconciles with his father. In between all this, very little happens. Marcie is a poorly developed character, and we are given no reason as to why she would try to invest so heavily in a relationship with Oliver. Overall, it's never clear what we are supposed to get from this movie, and it suffers heavily from that.

Larry Crowne is mostly a waste of good actors. Tom Hanks plays the titular title character who is fired at the beginning of the movie by his company for not having growth potential, as he has no college degree. Why Larry would not have been told this prior to his firing, as he is portrayed as a model employee, is never said. After Larry is fired he enrolls at community college where he meets a young pixie type who invites him to join a scooter gang. She also proceeds to make over Larry and improve his life.

However, despite this girl positively affecting Larry, Larry's love interest turns out to be his speech teacher, played by Julia Roberts. Robert's character is fairly awful. She's a horrible teacher and generally unpleasant to be around. She's also involved in a bad marriage and appears to drink too much.

The movie proceeds exactly how you would expect it to proceed. The road bumps are fairly minor, the characters don't really seem to learn much and in the end, Larry does find a new love in his teacher.

Overall, this isn't a bad movie, but it isn't a good movie. It's just kind of there. The characters don't seem particularly real, and the story is slightly ridiculous. There really isn't anyone to root for or against. Nothing unexpected happens, and while that is fine, it doesn't make for the most exciting movie.

Young Adult is a difficult movie for me. I can appreciate a movie that dares to make its title character unlikable, and goes even further by having that same character learn nothing from their bad acts. Having said all that, Young Adult kind of falls apart under a confused storyline that goes nowhere. Said storyline involves a former high school hot shot returning to her small town to free her ex-boyfriend from what she views as a horrible life where he is married with a new baby after receiving a birth announcement.

This isn't to say that there isn't good acting. Charlize Theron gives it her all, and plays her character to the hilt. Her Mavis is supremely self confident, utterly clueless and rather awful all at the same time. A former high school beauty queen who coasts through life ghost writing a failed teen series of books, drinks heavily and lives a somewhat bleak existence. It's not clear if Mavis is simply a sociopath, or really immature. Patton Oswalt also is excellent as a kind of Greek chorus to Mavis, a former classmate of hers who was brutally beaten when he was young, and now points out to Mavis the sheer insanity of her plan.

What just doesn't work is the writing. The reason that is revealed for Mavis receiving the birth announcement is nonsensical, and the former boyfriend's behavior with Mavis is just confusing given what we are later told in the movie. Ultimately the storyline just doesn't hold together, and it's a shame because there is a decent movie here hiding under some of the not so great stuff.

If you saw the late 90s movie, House on Haunted Hill, this movie will seem oddly familiar. An asylum is run by a doctor/mad man who tortures his patients until they revolt and kill him. As is often the case, the asylum is later turned into a college dorm. However, one wing has yet to be converted and thankfully remains filled with scary asylum stuff and the murderous ghost of the doctor.

We then meet our characters, and it's like The Breakfast Club meets Nightmare on Elm Street. Every kids fits a cliché and has a back story that sets up how they will be killed. It will take you about five seconds to figure out who survives. As one would expect, the students are picked off one by one and we end up with our heroes v. the murderous ghost doctor. I won't spoil it for you as to what happens. Suffice it to say, it's completely expected.

Asylum isn't a good movie, and its made worse by the fact that it feels like everyone from the writers to the cast just gave up at some point. The horrors here are not original, the storyline feels like someone literally fed a bunch of different horror movies into a typewriter and even the people we are supposed to root for aren't all that interesting. In short, use this film as a way to make yourself appreciate better movies.

Much like one character says to another in this film, they just hate seeing wasted potential. The Kids Are All Right is a movie saved only by the acting. The storyline is clunky and at times nonsensical, and you get the sense after finishing the movie that a lot has been missed without any proper kind of resolution.

To start with the good: Julianne Moore and Annette Bening own their roles. They take what could easily be two poorly developed characters and make them a lot more human than the script calls for them to be. The actors playing the children also shine as they experience the hurt that can be caused when you make life-changing decisions haphazardly.

Sadly, the bad is plenty in this film. What could be an interesting storyline, children of a lesbian couple finding their biological father and attempting a relationship with him while their mothers' relationship goes through a rough patch quickly descends into weird melodrama that is resolved in the most unsatisfactory way possible. Oddly, the biological father is the one who ends up being punished the most seriously, despite the fact he was not the one who initiated the whole thing, and his bad acts are more than matched by those of the other characters.

In short, I would say to give this movie a viewing, but merely for the acting. That should keep anyone watching from expecting too much.

The Best of Everything is a fun, if slightly campy time capsule in which to view the working women of 1959. The storyline follows three women working for a publishing company, and their desire to find love and get married. The leader of this troika is Caroline Bender (Lange), who has landed work as a typist and then finds her fiancée has dumped her for another girl. She works with Gregg Adams (Parker), a beautiful aspiring actress who is deeply insecure and April Morrison (Baker), the naive bumpkin from Colorado. Each woman faces a different challenge during the film. Morrison hooks up with a well to do guy named Dexter, but finds what a sleaze he is when she gets pregnant. Gregg falls in love with a stage director, who returns her affections for a time, but then dumps her, leading to Gregg suffering what can only be described as a psychotic break. Also along for the ride is Amanda Farrow, an editor at the publishing house who has a "take no prisoners" style, a lecherous editor named Mr. Shalimar and the office drunk, Mike Rice.

The absolute best things about this movie are the costumes and set design, along with the gorgeous scenes filmed in late 1950s Manhattan. The story itself is highly melodramatic and each of the girls seems to lose touch with reality at some point during their respective story lines, whether it be Caroline's ridiculously fast job promotions, Gregg's misadventure by high heel, or April inadvertently using a moving car as a way to land herself a new boyfriend. Joan Crawford is a supporting player here, but she makes one heck of an impression with the limited screen time she gets.

This is definitely a good movie. Obviously, the element that these women only think they can find fulfillment by being married to a man is a dated concept, along with the boss who can't stop pinching his female employees, but the performances of nearly all the actors really do shine. And I cannot really overstate just how beautiful the sets and costumes are here. It's an experience not to be missed!

Working Girl is simply a wonderful film. The plot is pure fairy tale, Tess McGill, an up by her bootstraps secretary has gotten her business degree, but absolutely no one will help her advance her way up the corporate ladder. After her boss tries to pimp her out to a colleague under the guise of helping her career, she is fired and gets a job working for a female executive in mergers and acquisitions, Katherine Parker. Katherine is refined and elegant where Tess is raw and working class, but she promises Tess that her hard work will be rewarded. However Tess soon finds out that Katherine stole her idea for a merger, and while Katherine is indisposed, Tess hatches a scheme behind her back to put the deal forward on her own. Along the way Tess partners up with Jack Trainer to help put the deal together and falls in love, but not without some bumps in the road to contend with in the form of Katherine.

Melanie Griffith convincingly carries the movie and deserved her Oscar nomination. Sigourney Weaver is excellent as the cold, calculating Katherine Parker and Harrison Ford is great as a romantic lead. Perhaps the biggest scene stealer of this film may be Joan Cusack as Tess McGill's big haired best friend, Cyn.

The only two things that detract from the movie are Katherine claiming to be 30 when Sigourney Weaver looked nearly a decade older, and the idea that Katherine and Tess could possibly wear the same size clothing. Other than that, this is a highly recommended flick!

Charlie Chan is in Egypt this go around when he gets called to investigate how various Egyptian treasures have ended up in private collections rather than the group to whom they were supposed to go. As with many Chan adventures, murder plays a role in the proceedings and it is up to Charlie to solve the case before an entire family ends up dead.

The set design of this movie is wonderful. It captures the art deco of the 1930s mixed with the Egyptian craze of the 1920s. The plotting leaves some holes, particularly with the character of Nadya who spends a portion of the movie acting as though she has something to hide, but ends up serving no real purpose, not even as a red herring.

As many people have noted, the main problem of the film is Stepin Fetchit. Besides the obvious racism intended with the character, he literally adds nothing to the movie. He drags down his scenes with mostly incomprehensible dialogue, and doesn't even work in the comic relief manner for which he was intended. Otherwise, this is a decent to good Fox-era Charlie Chan film.

Sorority Row is nominally a remake of 1983's House on Sorority Row. The plot lines are similar, but Sorority Row ditches the accidental death of the housemother for the accidental death of a sorority sister after a prank gone very wrong. Naturally her sorority sisters cover it up, and everything is just fine until graduation when a mysterious killer emerges to get revenge. Is it sorority sister back from the dead? Is it a crazed relative? Is it a completely random person who had no connection to the initial murder? While this movie does have some nice production values, it is Carrie Fisher who really saves things and manages to steal the movie despite having perhaps five or so minutes of screen time. The other characters are largely one dimensional, and basically those who exhibit typical horror movie behavior that leads to death, do indeed die. As with many horror movies, logic plays no real role here and characters do stupid things just for the sake of the storyline. There is also gratuitous nudity and a lot of gore. Sorority Row is by no means a good movie, but it is entertaining, which is more than can be said for a lot of other horror movies.

Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) seemingly has everything. She has two successful children, a lovely home and nice friends. She also has Harvey (Conrad Nagel) a man who is fond of her and suggests marriage to make up for the loneliness of Cary's widowhood. Into Cary's world enters Ron Kirby, a younger landscaper, with whom she falls in love. This is the main problem of the movie as Cary lives in a town full of vicious busybodies who have nothing better to do than gossip about her and her younger man. Cary's children are even worse, treating Ron coldly and having the audacity to treat their mother as a child incapable of making her own decisions. The question then becomes as to whether Cary and Ron can overcome these obstacles, and find happiness together.

This is an excellent movie. The only real issue I saw was that for all the fuss made over Cary and Ron's ages, they really don't look all that far apart in age, and it seems this was noted by the costume people who dress Wyman in a much more matronly fashion than her age at the time would dictate. However, the movie hits on all the right themes, societal pressure to conform, the viciousness of gossip and the joy of love. Agnes Moorehead is particular stand out as Cary's friend Sara, who sticks by her through thick and thin.