Sorority Row: Slasher Remakes, Feminine Degeneracy & Shwayze
or: The Brief Wondrous Life of Chugs Bradley
When the remake of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, creatively titled The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, was released in 2003, it set off a wave of slasher remakes that can be broadly sorted into two categories: those that treated the original film as a challenge, and those that did not. The filmmakers that attempted to rise to this imagined challenge usually ended up fumbling under pressure, while, ironically, the filmmakers that treated their source material with little-to-no-reverence typically produced the better work.
Consider, for example, Rob Zombie’s Halloween, a movie that might charitably be referred to as ‘a bit much.’ Zombie, to his credit, seems to recognize that John Carpenter’s original Halloween is a perfect movie, and that trying to simply update that film’s story would be a waste of time. With that in mind, he endeavored to follow Carpenter’s advice and “make it his own,” which to him apparently meant front-loading the film with nearly an hour of backstory for series villain Michael Myers. This is a questionable decision, given that the original film draws much of its power from the horrifying mystery of Michael’s inner life, but it’s not impossible to imagine a version of that story working as a movie. Unfortunately, the movie that actually exists was directed by Rob Zombie.
Rob Zombie is not a totally untalented filmmaker, but he often strains to build a compelling narrative in his films and, when faced with the eternal horror-film question of “How do I make this scary?”, he tends to fall back on the tropes of extreme violence and senseless cruelty. Extreme violence and senseless cruelty certainly have their place in horror fiction, but they can quickly become dull and irritating when deployed without care. Worst of all, when you watch Zombie’s films, you get the sense that he’s putting every idea he had into them, which ends up showing a lack of creative restraint and, given how few of those ideas actually work, a lack of ability.
All this is honestly fine in a genre pastiche like The Devil’s Rejects, but in a film like Halloween (2007), which will inevitably be compared to the original, it’s exhausting. You can feel Zombie straining to set his film apart from Carpenter’s work as well as the work of Carpenter’s many imitators, and the result is sweaty, loud, and unconvincing.
On the flip-side, the people who made Sorority Row clearly did not give a fuck about the movie they were remaking, and the result is extremely fun, extremely dumb, and, for lack of a better term, extremely 2009. The original film, 1982’s The House On Sorority Row, is the definition of ‘just fine’: more visually coherent and generally competent than many of its peers, with a few good kills and a clever inversion of the Dr. Loomis character from Halloween, but ultimately forgettable. The director would go on to do a lot of episodic television, along with the two back-to-back Hillary Duff classics, A Cinderella Story and The Perfect Man, and honestly, it was for the best.
Sorority Row (2009), in contrast to Rob Zombie’s Halloween, does not succumb to what Harold Bloom called ‘the anxiety of influence.’ You cannot accuse it of overthinking the material. You can, perhaps, accuse it of underthinking the material. The film lacks an identity of its own, and while you can trace many of its decisions back to specific reference points from the previous twenty years of horror cinema (I Know What You Did Last Summer being the most obvious), the central aesthetic feels generic in a very era-specific way – it’s as if there was an official guidebook for Horror Movies Of 2009, and Sorority Row was made exactly to its specifications.
Even though it’s only fourteen years in the past, 2009 on film feels like approximately ten thousand years ago. If you’ve seen a film from 2009 recently, you probably already know what I mean. The baseline aesthetic for studio movies from 2009 is dewey and high-contrast, with saturated colors captured during the last days of shooting on film – easily distinguished from the slick, gray, digital slurry that we get now. But more crucial to this film is its moral sensibility. The idea that mainstream fiction of any sort should be morally instructive and politically didactic, which is widely accepted in present-day culture, was completely alien to the people of 2009.
For a good example of this, consider Black Christmas, a groundbreaking slasher from 1974, which was remade in 2006 and again in 2019. Both films fall victim to the pressure of their highly-regarded source material, but they deal with it in different ways: the 2006 remake is filled with distracting grotesqueries such as incest, cannibalism, and a surprising number of eye-goungings, while the 2019 remake is an awkward attempt to reclaim the subgenre under the banner of feminist rage, a laudable goal that is thwarted by a bad script and a total fucking rip-off of the hallway scene from The Exorcist 3 that I’m still mad about.
Sorority Row, thankfully, doesn’t go quite as far as Black Christmas (2006), but it does possess a holistic tastelessness that I can’t help but admire. This tastelessness is visible from the film’s opening sequence, a faux-oner that moves through the bacchanalia of a party at the Theta Pi sorority house, but it extends to every aspect of the film, from the characterization of the victims all the way to the soundtrack.
About those victims: Sorority Row centers around six sorority sisters, and God almighty, are they awful. They behave poorly, they mistreat each other, and they casually use language that no one, not even villains, are allowed to say in present-day movies. They are unapologetically stupid, horny, drunk and selfish, and with the moderate exception of the main character (who still sucks), the movie shows no interest in redeeming them, even slightly. Also, the entire movie hinges around a convoluted prank with highly questionable justification that results in one of their sisters being stabbed through the chest with a tire iron, which would be terrible even if the prank was funny, which it isn’t.
An exhaustive list of all the bad behavior in this movie would be longer than everything I’ve written so far, so instead, I’d like to focus on one character: Charlene "Chugs" Bradley. Portrayed by Margo Harshman, Chugs is only in the first thirty minutes of the movie, but she packs enough into that half-hour to make an indelible impression on the viewer’s heart that is sure to last a lifetime.
The Ballad Of Chugs (Greatest Hits Edition)
In her first appearance during the film’s opening, Chugs is accosted by an unnamed guy who demands, “Hey, Chugs! Gimme a beer… and a BJ!” Chugs proceeds to throw an entire solo cup’s worth of beer into the guy’s face (and the camera), tosses the empty cup into the air (in slow-motion), then walks into the crowd and grabs an (open) bottle of Miller High Life out of the hands of an unnamed woman, who responds, understandably, by asking, “What the fuck?”
When all the main characters have gathered in a bedroom to toast their friendship, one of them sincerely compliments Chugs for being brave, bold, and unafraid of other people’s opinions. Chugs responds to this by asking, “Is this a bad time to tell you I boned your dad?” She quickly adds that it happened “after the divorce,” and while some of the characters laugh, Chugs does NOT seem to be joking.
Next, Chugs watches a live video feed of her brother Garrett making out with her sorority sister, Megan. Megan is currently enacting the first step of the prank that will result in her own death, but this scene is actually a double-prank, where some of the sisters watching along don’t know the reality of what’s happening – and, crucially, neither does the audience. This means that we have no exculpatory context for what we’re seeing when Chugs says stuff like “What can I say? My brother’s good in bed.”
When it is revealed to the other sisters that Chugs gave her brother roofies – which the audience does not yet know are fake – to use on Megan, Chugs offers up this haunting sentiment: “Come on, roofie sex isn’t that bad. You get laid and you get a good night’s sleep.” Again, this is before we know that it’s a prank.
As the perpetrators of the prank are revealing their motivations, Chugs initially says that Garret deserves to be tricked because he slipped Megan what he thought were roofies, but she then reveals that she’s equally upset about the fact that he rushed the fraternity Tri Pi, whose motto is, allegedly, “we’ll try any pie.”
When Garrett, believing that Megan has died from ‘bad’ roofies, accidentally ends up killing her for real, Chugs contributes absolutely nothing, freezing up and standing there with a shocked expression on her face while other people try to stem the bleeding – highly relatable. She doesn’t speak until someone mentions that her brother will be going to jail, at which point Chugs is the first person to suggest abandoning or hiding the body. Chugs is far from the mastermind of the whole scheme, but it’s still funny that she’s the first person to say “fuck Megan, just leave her to the wolves.”
Eight months later, Chugs is graduating along with the rest of her Theta Pi sisters, and she is the one to pop the cork on the bottle of champagne that they all pass back and forth. This is all in broad daylight at the graduation, to be clear. Everyone’s parents are still all around. They’re all still in their robes and everything.
The next time we see Chugs, she is, as her sister Ellie puts it, “helping out with a little Freshman orientation,” which means that she’s hooking up with a guy in the kitchen. This scene is amazing. First, the guy breaks away from the kiss, saying that Chugs “tastes like vomit.” Chugs helpfully explains that this is because she threw up “before,” adding “I ate a mint, so you’re fine.” This is, at most, maybe two hours after she opened that champagne. Then she tries to start kissing the guy again, but he’s clearly not into it, so she leans back, spreads her legs and says, “Oops! I forgot to wear underwear. [long pause] And it’s really cold down there. [longer pause]. Maybe you could warm it up for me?” The guy says, “This whole thing’s kind of grossing me out.” Chugs says, “Whatever. Move it loser. Not my fault you’re gay” and just leaves! And after she does, the guy picks at his tongue like he’s got some vomit residue on it.
When Chugs rejoins her sisters, she’s already got another glass of champagne in her hand.
Chugs, begging off from helping set up the night’s party, explains that she has to go to an appointment with her psychiatrist to “score some Oxys.” When one of the sisters’ boyfriends asks if Chugs would be willing to engage in oral sex with the psychiatrist to receive additional pills for the purpose of sharing, Chugs responds, “I wish it were that painless. Unfortunately for me, he’s more of an ass man.” Everyone groans sympathetically.
Before she goes to exchange anal sex for pills, Chugs is part of a meeting where the house mother – played by Carrie Fisher! – reminisces that for every boy she threw out of the house, there were five that she ignored. One of the sisters says “And sometimes there were five boys in one night. Right, Chugs?” Chugs good-naturedly responds “Hey, I have a lot of areas that need attention, I dunno.” Someone off-screen shouts out “Slut!” But you can’t keep Chugs down. She’s shameless. That’s where her power comes from.
Chugs arrives at what appears to be the home of her psychiatrist, Dr. Rosenberg. While wandering through the house looking for him, she grabs a bottle of a bizarrely-shaped, amber-colored liquid. I don’t know if it’s meant to be wine or a fancy liqueur, but whatever it is, Chugs starts drinking it like it’s a bottle of Miller High Life. She eventually finds Dr. Rosenberg handcuffed to his own bed, where he explains that the last session “ended abruptly.” He suggests that there’s no reason she can’t finish what the last patient started, tempting her with sample prescriptions. Chugs sighs, agrees, and leaves the room to freshen up, at which point Dr. Rosenberg is murdered by a mysterious assailant who throws a tire iron covered with razors into his head.
Chugs calls Jess to let her know that she’ll be late getting back because “Dr. Rosenberg is really making me earn the pills this time.” She looks unsuccessfully for some interesting pills in Rosenberg’s medicine cabinet, but eventually closes it. She pauses for a moment to look into the mirror, her face unreadable, before mirthlessly saying, “Cheers, slut,” and taking another big drink from her mystery bottle.
(Despite the fact that Chugs is currently being sexually manipulated by a member of the medical profession, this is the closest the movie comes to giving her a sympathetic characterization.)
Wandering around the house looking for the recently-murdered doctor, Chugs calls out, “I don’t have time for ‘catch me, rape me!’” before lying down on a nearby chaise lounge. She raises the mystery bottle to take another drink when who should appear but the killer, who uses their tire iron to slam the bottle into Chugs’ mouth and down her throat. He slams it deeper a second time and then, on the third time, pushes it far enough down her throat to draw blood, which mixes into the alcohol in the bottle. Chugs dies choking on booze. RIP to a legend.
In case this isn’t clear, I love Chugs. She’s an unapologetic scumbag who spends every day of her life horny and drunk. Consider her nickname, “Chugs” – an obvious reference to her drinking habit, but one that speaks to the implied depths of the character’s debauchery. The movie makes clear from the opening moments that this is a world that encourages hedonism, yet Chugs is the only one who’s been given a nickname in honor of her drinking. How much has she been drinking for the past four years?
Chugs is “punished” by the film, in the sense that her murder is centered around her chosen vice, but in the world of 2000s horror, her death is relatively tame and notably short. There’s about fifteen seconds between the killer’s appearance and the end of the scene, and while we don’t see Chugs actually choke out her last breath, there’s no indication that she lingered long enough to suffer any further indignities. This was during the decade of Saw – it’s not hard to imagine a version of Chugs’ death where she’s tricked into drinking acid, or where she’s forced to drink alcohol until her stomach bursts, or something similarly gruesome. Plus, the movie makes sure that the actually-repellant Dr. Rosenberg dies first. That’s good priorities!
Ultimately, Chugs is important because she’s a character that popular fiction offers us very few examples of: the female degenerate. Again, I don’t mean women who behave “poorly” and are punished by the film for their behavior – I mean women who are allowed by the film to behave just as terribly as a comparable male character. The male version of Chugs is so common that it doesn’t even register as notable when he shows up, but American cinema has a shameful deficiency of awful women. It should not be so! Narrative art is built on the foundation of human behavior, and when we deny the full spectrum of that behavior in all genders, we deny ourselves the full potential of that art.
Lest anyone accuse me of “doing a vulgar auteurism,” let me be clear that I don’t think that the filmmakers behind Sorority Row did this on purpose. I do not believe that they were seeking to address a flaw in American cinema when they populated their movie with female characters who are unabashedly awful. No, they were following the same creative impulse that led to the making of so many interchangeable slasher films in the 1980s: the desire to make as much money as possible while spending as little as possible.
While there are exceptions, this goal typically leads to a basic, no-frills style of filmmaking. I’m uncomfortable saying this, because I know that no movie gets made without a lot of work on both side of the camera, but this style of filmmaking has a certain element of thoughtlessness to it – almost as if the creators are following ‘path of least resistance’ as they navigate the numerous creative decisions that go into making a movie. This thoughtlessness leaves a lot of empty space that might otherwise be taken up with themes or ideas, and most of the time, the “stuff” that rushes in to fill this empty space takes the form of the era’s prevailing cultural style. There are numerous cultural objects that exemplify an era’s style, but for my money, the best way to check the cultural temperature of any given era is by listening to that era’s disposable pop music. And if you’re talking about disposable pop music from 2009, you have to talk about Shwayze.
In 2023, the name “Shwayze” refers to one man, a rapper who was born as Aaron Smith, but in 2009 it referred to both Smith and his collaborator Cisco Adler. In their formation as a duo, Shwayze was the rapper, and Adler was the guy with the guitar who sang the hooks. This arrangement may seem odd, because Adler can’t sing and all his hooks are terrible, but it actually makes a lot of sense when you realize that Shwayze is also bad at his job.
As a duo, Shwayze made a lot of ugly music during an exceptionally ugly era. The biggest song of 2009 was “Boom Boom Pow” by the Black Eyed Peas, and seemingly every other hit song contained some of that song’s DNA: loud, repetitive and grating, seemingly composed using only the most annoying synth tones available. Ironically, this environment is probably why Shwayze managed to hit it big with their first (and most successful) single, “Buzzin,” a laid-back rap song built around an acoustic guitar that aims for Sublime but lands much closer to CrazyTown.
At one point, Shwayze boasts, “I go town to town and I prey on sluts,” a surprisingly vile sentiment for such a ‘chill’ song. In another verse, he signs a girl’s left boob after sleeping with her and instructs her to “get that tattooed” and wait for him to return next summer. In between all that, Shwayze, who was at least 24 years old at the time of this song’s release, off-handedly mentions that he has to play it cool because he has “a rep to protect down at the high school.” Huh? Come again?
Anyway, because the minds behind Sorority Row couldn’t help but fill their movie with the ambient culture of the era in which it was produced, Shwayze’s song “Get U Home” was chosen for the soundtrack. “Get U Home” is actually the most 2009 of any of Shwayze’s output, meaning that it sounds most explicitly like a rip-off of “Let It Rock” by Kevin Rudolf. There are actually two versions of the song: there’s the original version, which has a classic tie-in music video that was directed by the director of Sorority Row and features several of the actresses from the movie (including Margo Harshman, reprising her role as Chugs)... and then there’s the Paul Oakenfield remix.
I would highly recommend watching the music video for the original version, but I really want to direct your attention to the remix, because the (relatively) stripped-down production on the chorus highlights how funny it is. This man is requesting that this woman take him into a public bathroom and strip him fully nude before having sex with him “up against a dirty wall.” It raises so many questions! Is she allowed to take any of her clothes off? Does he need the wall to be dirty?
Later repetitions of the chorus change it up so that the singer is now demanding that this woman “make love” (an odd choice of words, given the situation) to him outside against the side of a stranger’s car, an action that is almost guaranteed to set off the car alarm. It really does seem like the singer is more interested in exhibitionism than the girl he’s actually with, and the pained, enthusiastic way Adler sings it just kills me. I especially enjoy the way his voice just falls flat when he hits the lyric “up against somebody’s car.” It’s like he realized what he was singing in the middle of the line and just couldn’t go on any more.
I don’t want to go too hard against this song, because given the way nostalgia cycles work, I’m probably five years away from deciding that this kind of music is “actually really dope and spoke to a lot of contemporary issues” or some shit like that. But I was in college in 2009, which means that this music was made specifically for me. Well, not me me – the only fraternity parties I went to were hosted by the theater department, and I wasn’t even technically invited to those – but a hypothetical version of me who did not spend every night at home playing Halo 3.
So, even if I lack the specific experience that would give me insight into this song, I was close enough to the point of impact to tell you that this shit sucked. Even at the time, it was aggressively tacky, and the rest of the culture shared that in-your-face superficiality, as if it was daring you to call it out for being shallow. Many people did. Others, like me, kept on drinking that garbage, and now here I am, telling you all about it in a substack. Circle of life, man… circle of life.
Sorority Row is a trashy movie, shot in a trashy style and scored by trashy songs. And yet, through this total disregard for anything resembling depth or thematic ambition, Sorority Row produced Chugs, a female character whose entertainment value is derived solely from her trashiness. Very few women in fiction have been allowed this privilege, and based on this movie’s example, it seems like it may be easier to produce a captivatingly awful female character by accident than it is on purpose.
I also love Chugs, I'm so glad you also understood her innate charm