Sororities have long been a refuge for young women in higher education to gather, give back to the community, further their studies, and take photos in large groups while wearing novelty T-shirts. And today, as college students get back into the swing of classes at the beginning of a new semester, sorority members continue to aggressively expand their ranks through the grueling handshake-a-thon of recruitment. They’re a major force on any college campus, and while fraternities have long been the setting of hilarious hijinks for hard-R comedies, sororities have gotten the short shrift. But then again, why shouldn’t they? Are college-aged women not more mature than men, do they not have more self-respect that might preclude any inebriated antics?
Here to dispel that notion once and for all is the Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising trailer, replete with distaff versions of the collegiate mischief that brought studio executives such handsome paydays during the ’80s. The sequel to the smash 2014 comedy shifts focus to women behaving badly, whether that means scarfing painkillers and passing out in a strange man’s car, or inadvertently clotheslining yourself with a landline phone cord. The Radner family (Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne) now has to contend with a rowdy sorority next door, a group of renegades who have splintered off from an elite sorority in response to their spartan no-weed-in-the-living-room ordinances. (It’s worth noting that the rule that frat houses may throw parties while sorority houses may not is very real, and as backward as Chloe Grace Moretz triumphantly declares in the trailer.) Featuring supporting turns from Selena Gomez as the queen bee of the alpha sorority — though not Alpha sorority — and Dope‘s Kiersey Clemons as Moretz’s cofounder, Neighbors 2 seems poised to deliver more of the same untethered partying that endeared it to 16-to-24-year-olds the first time around. And for a bit of cosmic perspective, consider the schlubby teenage Rogen of the ’90s, unaware that in a couple of decades he would be chased by a horde of sorority girls trying to rip his clothes off. He has no idea of the fantastical future that awaits him. So sweet. So innocent.
