Blood Sisters

Bland effort from Roberta Findlay has a group of college girls spending the night in an old house as part of a sorority initiation. Seems that the house had been a cathouse where some grisly murders were committed years before by the out-of-wedlock son of one of the trollops. Guess who still lives in the house? Guess what happens to the stock assortment of chicks who populate this film? If ever a movie's plot was made up as the movie was being lensed, it's this one. And the ending makes no sense--come on, give us someone in this movie to feel sympathy for! Guess that's just the Findlay touch.

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.

"Blood Sisters" was just a terrible movie. The story went: a bunch (too many, actually) of sorority pledges spend the night in a haunted ex-bordello. Inside, there are a lot of ghosts (including lesbian ghosts, kids), but nobody pays them any mind, they only care about the psycho that slaughters them easily and unnoticed during the night. There was a foreign feel to the film, though I think it was American, and it felt like it was made around 1981, although the tape claimed it was ‘87. There's a ton of nudity and disturbingly pornographic closeups of kissing, and some pretty brutal killings. Listen for great dialogue like, "You don't have a father...do you know what that makes you? A pervert!" Usually, these movies are fun, and I love to watch them, but not "Blood Sisters." It was dark, dull, illogical, and not really worth watching.

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.

A group of sorority sisters plan their initiation at a brothel where a horrific murder took place thirteen years prior. What they didn't expect was that the killer has returned to knock off anyone who dares enter the house.

The movie starts with a young boy who enters a bordello of some sorts and uses a shotgun to kill two people who are about to have sex. Fast forward 13 years later to Edmonson College where we see a sorority of girls who have set up a pledge initiaition at the same house where the murder took place. The initiation is that the new pledges have to spend the night at the infamous brothel house for the night. As the evening goes on, a few of the pledges see ghosts wandering the halls and rooms. Pretty soon, someone begins killing the pledges leading to the killer reveal and an unsatisfying ending.

Blood Sisters is one of the those "so bad it's good in a very bad way" low budget horror films from the 80's. I thought it was poorly done with an extremely low budget (of 50K), but it tried to be an entertaining horror film with some supernatural/ghostly scenes of the deceased stalking the rooms of the old house. The acting was bad all around and felt like they were university students who were grabbed off of a campus and offered $100 each to run around and scream for the movie to be completed.

My biggest issue with Blood Sisters is that it drags on and on a bit too much even for my liking. There are too many scenes of the ghosts in the rooms of the house and flashbacks of occurrences from years ago which seem to be filler for the movie. When the killer of this movie finally shows themselves, I'm already feeling a bit bored with the whole thing. The killer reveal is done decently, but viewers can tell a mile away who the murderer is when it is finally revealed. The ending is veruy blah as well.

Blood Sisters was in a DVD collection set that I purchased years back. I was way more interested in the other two movies that came with this for sure. This one is a lame late 80's slasher that does have a bit of effort and heart deep in there.

3/10