We’re ending out the Lifetime horror series that was just a competition out here not so long ago, with a look at The Haunting of Sorority Row, a copy of which the folks at Lifetime sent over. I have to admit, out of all the various types of horror film, I often find ghost stories the scariest, mostly because they have something of a ring of plausibility to them. Will The Haunting of Sorority Row fare well? Lifetime horror hasn’t done well for us so far, but will this one break the streak?

The Haunting of Sorority Row follows Samantha Willows, college freshman, as she seeks to join Delta Phi Theta, a sorority full of evil, unpleasant women that apparently everyone’s dying to be part of. The dying, meanwhile, will become quite literal as many of the sisters of Delta Phi Theta start dying. But what are they dying to protect? That’ll be left for us to discover throughout the film.

It’s hard to read these people–I spent most of this movie in a conflicted state of hoping they’d survive or hoping that whatever ghostly whatever was following them around would kill them off because they were, as previously mentioned, deeply unpleasant people. And yes, it’s actually fairly standard Lifetime fare–for crying out loud, the sorority girl with the “high metabolism” really doesn’t have a high metabolism at all.  I think you all probably know what she has, and the only thing high about her is the chemical burn rate on her esophagus.

In fact, for a movie that’s so much of a ghost story, there really isn’t a whole lot of ghost appearances going on in this. It’s profoundly tame for a horror title and it’s downright drab, really. I don’t know what Leighton Meester’s even doing in this–she was doing so well as a scream queen for a while there, with appearances in stuff like Hangman’s Ghost and Drive-In.

They tried, give them credit. They tried to make an atmospheric, creepy, ghost story romp, but they just didn’t have the stones to pull it off proper. It gets close, and for neophytes just getting started in horror this will likely do well. It’s low impact horror, not big on shocks, decent on the creepy but not quite sufficient for any serious horror buff. Still though, you can do a whole lot worse. The ending, meanwhile, will bring the creepy in rather nicely.

The Screenhead Ten Scale rewards effort, and hands The Haunting of Sorority Row a six out of ten. It’s not going to make any waves with real horror buffs, but new folks might get sufficiently creeped out for a good chill.