The Eric Roberts Horror Collection: Sorority Slaughterhouse (dir by David DeCoteau)

At a college that appears to be located on a beach in Hawaii, Dean Whitman (Eric Roberts) is about to lose his job. He’s been accused of taking advantage of his female students, something that he admits is true. Somewhat drunk and disillusioned with the world, Whitman has a conversation with a creepy clown doll. (The doll comes out a box that specifically says that it was made by voodoo priestess.) Whitman decides to play with a gun and — whoops! — shoots himself in the head. Whitman’s mind is transferred into the doll’s body. In the form of the clown doll, Whitman goes after the sorority that he blames for his downfall.

Eric Roberts is only onscreen for a handful of minutes in 2015’s Sorority Slaughterhouse but we hear his voice throughout the film. It turns out that doll is a total pervert! What’s odd is that the doll is also really small and it moves somewhat stiffly, leading me to wonder just how exactly it manages to effortlessly kill so many people. Admittedly, most of the deaths are edited in such a way that we never actually see the doll and the victim in the same shot but it’s still hard to look at that doll and imagine it as a killer. Of course, the victims are all just dumb enough to fall victims to a killer doll. One girl uses the doll as a vibrator. A guy is suffocated with a balloon animal. Someone else is murdered by having Drain-O poured over her. I can’t imagine that product placement was appreciated.

This is a David DeCoteau film and I’m pretty sure that the sorority house was the same house that DeCoteau used in Bigfoot vs D.B. Cooper. It’s hard not to appreciate DeCoteau’s determination to make mockbusters for next to no money. This film obviously owed a lot to Child’s Play and the DeCoteau-directed Puppet Master films and DeCoteau wasn’t going to let a lack of special effects get in the way of the particular killer doll movie. That said, the action moves very slowly and the doll is in no way intimidating, even if it does sound like Eric Roberts reading dirty DMs. Personally, when it comes to collaborations between Eric Roberts and David DeCoteau, I prefer A Talking Cat!?!

Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed: