cult film freak: JUNE KENNEY MANIPULATED BY SUSAN CABOT AS 'SORORITY GIRL'

June Kenney in SORORITY GIRL Year: 1957 Grade: C+

Whether playing Charles Bronson's tough moll in MACHINE GUN KELLEY or a beauty queen mogul turned monstrous WASP WOMAN, Susan Cabot was b-movie director Roger Corman's greatest leading lady, combining a raw, formidable prowess with brooding melancholy, often within the same character...

With dark hair and full lips, she was pretty, even beautiful, but only when she needed to be... until morphing into a bitter scowl as intense as any comparably well-known character actress...

June Kenney in SORORITY GIRL with Barbara Cowen

But in Corman's SORORITY GIRL, she's simply too old for the title poor-rich-girl role, manipulating her college roommates who are actually the correct age... overall seeming more like a jealous young den mother...

Initially her most bullied victim (both emotionally and physically) is stacked ugly duckling Barbara Cowan: yet their scenes needed to be amplified and progressed... they would have probably shared homoerotic/top/bottom aspects had this been a 1970's exploitation...

Susan Cabot in SORORITY GIRL

Also starring regular Corman good-girl Barboura Morris, underused as a moral compass, Cabot's most vulnerable victim is Corman and fellow b-auteur Bert I. Gordon's lithe blonde-beauty June Kenney, secretly pregnant while working at Dick Miller's campus beer-hall, shown only in the first and final act...

Which has her 11th hour suicide attempt injecting suspenseful melodrama that SORORITY GIRL, the movie and the character, needed more of — to make this more of an intense thriller, which the moodily energetic Cabot seems otherwise primed for.