Product: Sorority Boys (2002)
Rating: 3.0
Enjoyable enough
The plot of Sorority Boys can best be summed up as: Animal House meets Revenge Of The Nerds meets Tootsie, plus lashings of American Pie thrown in for good measure.In an unnamed university campus somewhere in America, there is a fraternity called Kappa Omicron Kappa ("KOK" - yes, we all get the joke) filled with rejects from Animal House. They hold wild parties where they invite the beautiful girls from the Tri Pi sorority. Any girl caught sleeping with stud jock Adam (Michael Rosenbaum) gets to do the Walk Of Shame the next day where she gets jeered by frat brothers lining up on the corridor outside Adam's room and her photograph taken for posterity. Ugly girls are not allowed, and there are special teams of "dog catchers" to roust them out.Needless to say, all is not well. Adam and his roommates Dave (Barry Watson) - the "smart" one - and Doofer (Harland Williams) - the big and dumb one - are accused of pilfering the frat funds and are expelled from KOK by the snivelling president Spence (Brad Beyer) - who has a weird voice and pompadour hairstyle to give us a hint that he's going to be the bad guy.The boys are in trouble, for if they don't belong in the fraternity, then they won't be able to attend the annual Cocktail Cruise where they get to mingle with ex-frat members (in most cases their parents) who have graduated and have since become industry power figures. And if they don't attend the cruise they won't have the opportunity to secure plum jobs using the Old Boys Network and they may be doomed to live lives of obscurity and poverty!In desperation, they dress up as girls to sneak back into the fraternity in order to retrieve a video tape which may hold crucial evidence that demonstrates their innocence and identify the real culprit who have stolen the money. Needless to say, they get nabbed by the dog catchers and deposited in front of the Delta Omicron Gamma sorority ("DOG" - yawn).DOG contains the female equivalents of nerds and geeks - ugly girls, big girls, girls with loud annoying voices, ethnic girls, ... The president of DOG, Leah (Melissa Sagemiller), takes pity on them and invites them to pledge with the sorority. At first they refuse, but then when they found out they get free lodging and food ...The rest of the film are full of jokes involving the guys trying to act as women and survive on campus, bonding with the girls in the sorority, discovering their feminine sides, and finding out that life is not so easy if you are a DOG. All the degrading things they did to DOGs are now being done to them, especially when a young KOK takes a fancy to "Adina" (Adam) and we know that eventually Adam will have to experience the Walk of Shame!I liked the premise of the boys discovering their female sides and what life is like for the other sex, and the film certainly had a lot of opportunity to explore some interesting issues. But no, the filmmakers have decided to go for the lowest common denominator and exploited just about every cliché in the genre. In the end, we get something that is tedious and disappointing rather than something original and witty.What would have made the film really interesting is if at least one of the boys discovers that he prefers living as a woman (preferably all three), and then the rest of the film could explore how this affects their relationships with each other and the other characters. We certainly come tantalisingly close - one of the boys is on the verge of entering into a lesbian relationship, another has the opportunity to experience a relationship with a man, and the third discovers the the joys of sisterhood bonding. But just as things become interesting, the film backs down and we're all back in Kansas. Oh well ...