Blood Sisters – review

Director: Joe Castro

Release date: 2003

Contains spoilers

Like Bloody Tease this film has both 2D and 3D versions of the film on the DVD and like Bloody Tease the 3D doesn’t work. Now, to be fair, perhaps it is my 3D glasses at fault… No, they work fine with the book they came with. It might be a resolution or NTSC to PAL thing but… well the 3D in the menus seemed to work so I’m left thinking its another failed gimmick. Nevertheless let us forget the gimmick, press the 2D button and look at the film…

Oh dear, we are on college campus again, we obviously have no budget but… Let us start with the prologue. A man, Jake (David Veach), arrives at a sorority house with a girl who doesn’t want to use names – she’s called Brandi (Anne Marie) it later transpires. She leads him into a building that is festooned with cheap Halloween fake cobwebs and her friend Rose (Phoebe Dollar) enters. A threesome seems to be offered until they attack.

Something weird with the vampire attacks, they seem to devolve into a stripshow to camera, with either the vampires stripping or, if the victim is female, the victim removing her clothes. The actions to camera could well be for the none working 3D and it is all a little bit odd – one might say that it indicates the ecstasy of the vampire bite, except it isn’t that lyrical and always ends with cutting to the real world and screaming.

Tracy (Erica Howard) is attending Dunwich University, she is a journalism student with really bad dialogue and precious little acting ability put on show. She is to share a room with Melissa (Kerry Lui), whose previous roommate vanished. Indeed many students seem to be vanishing – probably why there seems to be no one on campus!

They are in a class, Ancient Studies, as is a boy called Colin, who fancies Tracy and the three members of the sorority Alpha Beta Pi – Rose, Brandi and the leader Eliza (Deborah Huber). They are the hottest, smallest sorority on campus, every girl wants to be in it even if they seem creepy. The teacher is Professor Frye (Lenny Wilson) and the classroom seems so small it was probably a living room somewhere!

Of course we have already seen that the sorority are vampires. We see Rose hunt down a woman in a car park by punching out a man and dragging the woman off. She is bitten and starts to strip and, despite a fantastic leg tattoo, all I could do was wonder at how fake her boobs were – I mean seriously they looked awful, sorry… Anyway, journalist Tracy starts to get a whiff of a story but Eliza has already chosen her to be a new sorority member.

Rose actually becomes a voice of warning against the proposition, suggesting Tracy speak to Professor Frye but its all too late and, having fed Tracy and Melissa vampire blood, the two have to fight their urges and not imbibe human blood – or they will turn into full vampires…

Vampire lore is a little all over the place. The vampires can clearly go out during the day and then Brandi and Rose feed a guy their blood – just enough so that he can’t enter sunlight and is thus trapped in the house. We discover later that sunlight only effects vampires immediately after a feed.

Vampires, it transpires, are the earliest form of intelligent life on the planet. They cultivated humanity as a slave race that they could use as breeding stock – unfortunately humanity spread like a plague and vampires slunk into the shadows. They tend to live in harmony with humanity and feed on animals, so the actions of the sorority are not appreciated but vampires cannot kill each other, it’s the law, half vampires on the other hand… Their true form seems to be a wormy, snake thing.

To kill a vampire stakes tend to be the main weapon of choice, sunlight works as mentioned above and both methods lead to an unseen extra blowing dry ice into the shot. Kill the main vampire and half vampires become human again, allegedly.

This isn’t good. The acting and dialogue leave much to be desired. The sets are cheap and sparse. The blood effects work okay and some of the bites look quite visceral but others look like fake blood on unblemished skin – overtly loud crunching sound effects don’t particularly help. A poor film generally that doesn’t really have a redeeming feature. 1.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.