Blood Sisters

For a sorority initiation, a group of pledges and there pledgemaster must spend the night in a haunted bordello. A killer also happens upon the scene. Slow moving slasher film with no appealing characters, little logic, poor effects & music score, and slack direction. A total failure in all respects. Rated R; Nudity, Sexual Situations, and Violence.

While these things may seem like fun new additions to the slasher movie subgenre, this film flat-out fails to deliver on all counts.

It begins with a psycho kid blasting a fat hooker and her trick with a rifle at a whorehouse, before cutting to modern times (13 years later) at the Kappa Gamma Tao sorority house. After wasting time at a bar and with a sex scene, sister Linda (Amy Brentano) takes seven pledges to the now abandoned brothel for an initiation scavenger hunt. The house has been booby trapped by fun-loving frat guys (who look like they're reaching their 40s), but ghosts and a psycho killer show up.

Director/scripter/cinematographer Roberta Findlay, whom I believe is one of the most prolific female filmmakers of all time, handles some of the supernatural scenes reasonably well given the budget (a standout being an interesting ghost/mirror sequence), but, with its low-grade cast of unknowns, dark/dreary atmosphere and derivative storyline, BLOOD SISTERS isn't a bit of fun to watch. And I still have no idea why the house is full of ghosts of people who used to work there since only two murders were actually committed.

Guys just wanting to see sexy babes cavorting around in little clothing may be equally disappointed by the selection of actresses on hand. A few of the actresses are attractive, but aside from Marla MacHart, there are really no stunners here, though some of them do appear topless from time to time. In addition, it's is so slow-moving that it takes nearly an entire hour until the first murder!

Thirteen years after a disturbed boy blasts his fat hooker mother and her trick to pieces with a shotgun, a group of sorority pledges must spend the night in the now deserted brothel and participate in a scavenger hunt as part of their initiation ceremony. To ensure a thoroughly terrifying experience awaits for the girls, three frat boys have rigged the house with pranks, but they really needn't have bothered, for the place is not only haunted by the ghosts of dead prostitutes and their customers, but is home to a knife wielding maniac as well.

In my IMDb write-ups for similarly themed horrors The Nesting (directed by XXX film-maker Armand Weston) and The ghosts of Sodom (by Lucio Fulci), I expressed my disappointment over these films' lack of depravity, explaining that, given the salacious premise, they deserved to be filled with plenty of sex and gore, particularly when made by people for whom exploitation should be second nature; unfortunately, Roberta Findlay, also an ex-porn director and the woman behind the infamous shocker Snuff (1976), doesn't fare any better with her haunted hooker horror, just about delivering on the sex front with plenty of topless starlets and a few tame soft-core couplings, but completely screwing up matters when it comes to bringing on the splatter.

According to the interview with Findlay included on the DVD of Blood Sisters, the film was written in a hurry to meet a financial deadline, and her low, low budget wouldn't allow for fancy special effects. Hence we get lots of nudity (tits being much cheaper to film than special effects), and a whole slew of dull, bloodless death scenes designed to save on bucks, including strangulation with a garter, suffocation inside a coffin, a hanging, and a fall down a stairwell.

Combine the lack of blood and guts with an awful script that doesn't start killing the pledges off for about an hour and which ultimately makes not a lick of sense (where did all those other ghosts come from and where did everyone go at the end?), and you have one hell of an unsatisfying film.

Blood Sisters (1987)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

A group of sorority sisters head to a house that has been abandoned for thirteen years. It turns out that a boy murdered his prostitute mother and one of her lovers in the house. Soon the girls are seeing strange visions and begin getting murdered.

BLOOD SISTERS is another low-budget movie from cult filmmaker Roberta Findlay, which really doesn't have too much going for it. I'm willing to bet that fans of the director will enjoy being able to see her working during the slasher era but she admits on the DVD bonus features that there really wasn't much motivation for her to create a good movie.

It's clear Findlay was working on a low-budget and this means all the gore is missing and the death scenes take place off screen. You know, I've always wondered why people bothered making these types of films if their budget wouldn't allow for special effects. Instead of gore we've given countless nude scenes, which help the sleaze factor but even this gets boring after a while. The performances are mostly laughable and there certainly aren't any scares.

BLOOD SISTERS is certainly a forgettable movie that has some mildly amusing moments.

My review was written in June 1987 after watching the movie on Sony video cassette.

"Blood Sisters" is a relatively new horror film (lensed last year under the generic title "Slash"), but relies on an old-hat format that genre fans tired of at least five years ago. Pic bypassed theatrical distribution for home video use instead.

Filmmaker Roberta Findlay's script mixes one part "The Nesting" and one part "Hell Night": seven pledges to Kappa Gamma Tau sorority ar escorted to a spooky old mansion by sorority sister Linda (Amy Brentano), where they have to spend the night without getting scared while searching for objects (a la scavenger hunt) as their initiation assignment. Of course frat boys have rigged up the place with practical joke tricks.

Per a helpful prolog sequence, she was a brothel 13 years ago where a prostitute and her customer were killed by shotgun blasts. Sure enough, the traumatized little boy (locked in a room by his prostie mother during childhood) has grown up and is killing the pledges one by one. Adding a supernatural element, the girls, to varying degrees, see hallucinations in the mansion (especially in mirrors) of the ghosts of the dead prostitutes and their customers.

PIc consists mainly of the girls wandering around the house searching with flashlights, picked off in gory fashion. There is plenty of nudity and softcore sex (including the requisite lesbian scene) but no scares and little of interest. As a snotty pledge, Maria Machart is the prettiest actress in the cast, but none of them have challenging roles. Special effects are minor.