Blood Sisters

"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.

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.

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.

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