Blood Sisters (1987) Horror Slasher

Blood Sisters (1987) -The film starts setting up the killer as many a horror movie does. A small boy is traumatized by a little girl, with her making fun of him. See she knows that the boys Mother is a prostitute in the local brothel. The boy runs away from the taunting. Goes home and shoots his Mother to death with a gun that is way too big for him. This is especially important information about the killer when we jump forward whatever number of years to when he is an adult and again free in society, Edmonson College 13 years later. We see pledges getting ready for their final task for Cappa Gamma which is to spend the night in the house where the murders took place. Nothing good will ever come of this but that is what makes it a horror film. Pretty standard fare for a slasher at first I thought there were some high ideas to be explored in the film but the cut was bad. Then I watched the interview with veteran Director Roberta Findlay and she basically said she threw this film together on the quick to avoid a tax penalty. It shows in the film with a couple different tracks the plot takes and some of the ideas never being fulfilled in the film.
There are a couple things we can learn from this movie and horror in general. If the killer is a traumatized child and it is years later but we never are shown the killer, then the killer is someone we have seen in another role in the film. Stealing from the great psycho this killer is seen in bits, a hand here, a back there but never fully seen. Women's clothes are in frame sure but since we sort of know it was a boy that killed his Mom we know this is to throw us off the track. This blocking is to have a big reveal at the end of the film and chances are the killer is one of the cast who has been introduced earlier in the film. So who will it be. Well since the victims will be women we can safely go with the men that leaves it to about four people. So which of them is the secret crazed killer? The second thing we can be sure of is that each of the girls will have a trait to define them. Linda (Amy Brentano) the sorority's head is dating the football player John (Brian Charlton Wrye).  Make a point at identifying the Jewish girl, Bonnie and there are several jokes she makes to make her look stupid. There is also Diana flirtatious one, Helen the cautious on,Cara is the psychic one, etc etc.
Guys had set up a whole lot of gags in the house to make it spooky, skeletons, and a coffin and some prerecorded noises. They are played to be buffoons and are played by the actors more for laughs with lines like " Eat my shorts tampon breath." One is a bit jumpy thinking the house is haunted. Played for comedy there is a whole sequence getting Larry more and more scared until he leaves. The girls for their part will be creeping around in the dark on a scavenger hunt.
 The girls are blindfolded and driven to the house. Instead of using the scene to really accomplish something the director is happy to let it be filler with meaningless gabbing. So they arrive and the killer up in an upper window moves a curtain so we will know that he is there.
  So you would think this is all a setup for your average slasher. Problems with the script though have the story going different directions so it never quite gets there. Early on there are visions of ghost, primarily seen by Cara but then mirrors also flash back to scenes of the past. What is frustration is those parts never really play a part in the plot. The characters don't react to the ghostly apparitions in any meaningful way. They don't really add any depth to anything we don't already know about the house's history either. The spirits don't threaten or interact in anyway with the girls so they are wasted.
  The killer returns to his childhood home theme is filled with references to Psycho. The kills are not particularly graphic or suspenseful and there is no final girl. Oh and the cops in the New Jersey town are the worst cops ever, brushing off the last victims story of murder so casually you would think the production ran out of money the day they were shooting.
  So in the end this is not a film that is worthy of a recommendation.

Breeders (1986) Horror Aliens

Breeders (1986) - It's the mid 1980's and no longer can a guy get a ticket to a girl's bedroom with a cheap Italian dinner in a second rate restaurant. At least that is what Donna (Natalie O'Connell) says as she storms out of the cab in a seedy part of NYC. Well actually it was the corner of Gold St. and Platt St.  but in this case her date gone bad is the least of Donna's worries. Feeling unsafe  will be the least of her worries in a minute or two of movie time. Poor Donna after having a false alarm in the form of an old man walking his dog is terrified, carried off and raped by the guy when he transforms into an alien creature.

  There is very little held back in this low budget monster flick. The alien or monster that must reproduce seems to be a well worn theme in the movies. In this blog alone I have reviewed, Decoys and Candy Stripers both were the alien must survive through sex. Unlike those films where the aliens inhabit the form of human woman and use their sexuality to lure men in, this film it is a male alien and the sexual contact is rape. This is harsh but luckily nothing is shown onscreen to further exploit the female characters in the film. There could probably be or probably already has been, an article on the subject of why the male alien forces himself on victims while the female alien seduces the victim. Why can't the male alien also Seduce? The psychology of horror certainly does not preclude the a male alien seducing female victims. Can you the reader name more horror movies where sexual contact is the way the creature(s) need to survive?

  Our leads in the film are Dr. Gamble Pace (Teresa Farley) and Det. Dale Andriotti (Lance Lewman) who are such cardboard line readers that the scenes they are in are almost unbearable to watch. We quickly learn that there have been 5 attacks similar to Donna's and that in all the cases the assailant appeared to be a different person. We also learn that the women now have strange brainwave patterns so somehow they have been physically changed and topping it all off we learn that the women were all virgins at the time of the attack.
 The film moves on to more victims while our two main characters try to figure out what is going on. The next victim is a model Karinsa (Frances Raines) and surprisingly the photographer Gail (Amy Brentano) and female assistant Alec (Adriane Lee) are later victims also. This is surprising because since the victims are all virgins that means that there are three 20 somethings in a room in NYC that are all virgins. I don't recall a time when that has ever happened before by chance. From this point in the film there is an increasing amount of nudity, probably to increase VHS sales at the time of its release. In fact it suddenly starts feeling like the only reason the women are on film is to add skin. The model starts with a nude stretching routine but there is also a nurse at the Hospital Kathleen (LeeAnne Baker) who upon returning home immediately strips out of her nurses outfit and has no underwear of any kind on. Strange to head off to work at the hospital without a bra or patties under you blouse and skirt. It certainly will give the lech something to drool over while waiting for this sort of badly acted film to end.
  It is not that the plot is awful, it is just sort of middle of the road with some clunky dialog and only thin connecting threads to get the main characters to figure out the mystery. Writer / Director Tim Kincaid is far from inept. The story connects all the different pieces in what is a reasonable story even if it will win no awards. If the execution and acting was better it would be very passable. Our main characters connect the dots as the women who were attacked wake and in a trance walk nude from the hospital. Our leads (who are horrible, did I mention they are horrible) get together and head to the tunnels under the city. He continues to make films in the adult film industry as Joe Gage.
  The story eventually gets Gamble and Dale under the Empire State Building where they find all the victims writhing in a slime pit transforming or having baby aliens who will be an unstoppable alien army ready to enslave mankind. They get the full story of how the aliens arrived from a human alien shape shifter, who tells them they can look however they want and arrived from space as spores. The aliens need virgins healthy and strong to create a super strain of beings to rule earth. They tried to do it with an old street person woman but she only produced a mutant. Our heroes first deal with the mutant baby and then with the alien shape shifter before electrocuting all the victims in the slime pool.

The gore is great and silly at the same time, the music the techno 80 trash that was part of so many low budget horror films in those years. The gore is particularly fun at the end when we see the malformed alien baby and the leads proceed to slaughter it. Then when workmate of Gamble, Ian (Ed French), who is the alien explaining the film is finished his head explodes showing the creature instead. Very cool. Finally the setup for the sequal that would never be is classic.
Rating (3.6) 5.0 and up are recommended, Some more recommended than others.
This film also gave several find that location moments throughout the movie. Leaving in a street sign while setting a scene allows me to use Google maps to track down these shot locations. Here are the three I found.
1. When the cab lets Donna out she is at the corner of Platt St and Gold St. NYC.

2. At the fashion shoot they set up by showing the intersection of 7th and 38th streets NYC.

3. The final one was a bit tougher but I think I have it as 199 Avenue A and E.12th St. NYC.