Don’t hang out with bitches. In Sorority Row, that could get you killed—but not after a little disreputable fun. It’s another remake of a bargain-bin slasher that probably shouldn’t have been remade, and the word “exploitation” is practically tattooed to the buxom heroines’ chests. But the movie nabbed me from the start and knocked the wind out of me laughing. It’s a retread, I’m sure, but it isn’t torture porn, and its satiric kick keeps punting the movie forward without blustering it off-course into self-conscious meta-nightmare. Sorority Row has probably gotten press mostly for being the major-motion-picture début of Audrina Patridge, an “actress” from MTV’s The Hills; indicative of the movie’s status as exuberant trash entertainment (as opposed to whorish trash mimicry), she’s the first bitch to be killed off.

Why did I go see Sorority Row? On The Late Late Show a few weeks back, Craig Ferguson introduced his guest, Carrie Fisher, with a clip of her brandishing a shotgun in a Greek-letter-house kitchen, jeering at an unseen assailant, “Don’t think I’m afraid of you. I run a house with 50 crazy bitches!” Fisher, who, in 1975, played one of the screen’s best slutty teenagers in Shampoo, is, alas, not given the kind of camp-classic, aging-queen role that might have really electrified the movie and maybe even resuscitated her career—Carrie Fisher as Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford. The producers of Sorority Row were probably more interested in keeping the cameras ogling the young meat—on both the prissy vixens and their preppy bucks—but they sacrificed some wicked-witchy fun that I’m certain the writers (Josh Stolberg and Pete Goldfinger) and director (Stewart Hendler) would have loved to provide. They clearly weren’t interested in providing an acting showcase for inchoate talents, but as the bimbo-in-chief, the 21-year-old Leah Pipes acts wonderfully jaded; her character is so good at keeping her head that we’re all the more excited to see it lobbed off.

This story of girls whose covered-up secret comes back to haunt them in the form of deadly, “pimped-out” tire irons is indefensible as anything more than a guilty pleasure—though most professional reviewers think even less of it than that. The contrived ending doesn’t bother me here; is it any less plausible than the plot of Vertigo? (Besides, who’s to know this couldn’t happen in a sorority house on the night after graduation? I don’t remember my last night of college…) In truth, the murders—save for one, which comes too early on (and seems derivative of a gag from Snoop Dogg’s Hood of Horror)—aren’t staged as cleverly as they could have been; the jokes, with a few exceptions, are funny but forgettable; and the party scenes are as inauthentic to collegiate life as ever—they could be outtakes from Asher Roth’s “I Love College” video. Background details are noticeably lacking. I couldn’t tell which coast they went to school on, or even whether it was in a big city or small town, and only the girl in glasses seems to have had a major. But what really counts here is that the people who made this had nothing to lose—except audience interest—and that they kept because the fun of vivifying this kind of trash must be infectious. Their edge is that they really had it out for the rich-bitch culture that The Hills represents, that MTV doublespeak that feigns an ironic distance from subjects who are nonetheless vindicated for being tinsel idols of consumer culture. Television viewers laugh—and then, feeling inadequate, shop. In Sorority Row, viewers laugh—and, avenged for being made to feel inadequate, watch the spoiled scions get chopped. This in-utero Sex and the City setting is devoid of virgins, so they’re not the ones spared, as they were in Halloween. This time we get a survivor on scholarship.