Sisterhood, The (2005)
Dread Central Staff
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Starring Barbara Crampton, Jennifer Holland, Michelle Borth, Kate Plec, David Storm Newton
Directed by David DeCoteau
The Sisterhood is the tale of a pretty, virginal, telekinetic, pre-med student coerced by her paranormal psychology professor to help infiltrate and defeat a sorority of glam goth bisexual Satanists. If only the actual movie was as entertaining as that sentence makes it sound.
The Sisterhood represents a new low even by David DeCoteau standards. DeCoteau’s female counterpart to his Brotherhood franchise reeks of being a hastily slapped together production, one in which little or no thought ever went into the story, and the filmmaking itself is so lazy I wouldn’t be surprised to know that DeCoteau shot it during the lunch breaks of whatever other film he was working on at the time. It feels like a movie they began filming before completing the script but the production schedule was so miniscule that they ended up having to just make the rest of it up right there on the spot.
We witness in the film’s opening five minutes a Scream-style killing of a BATS member by a hooded assailant in a glowy-eyed mask. Before the film is over, we’ll never get any real explanation as to who this girl was or why exactly she was killed. More importantly, there’s no logical explanation for hiding the identity of the killer during this scene since the villain’s identity is common knowledge the first moment she’s introduced less than ten minutes later. This typifies how little concern there was for the actual plot.
Pure as snow hotty Christine arrives at Hot Topic University, where every single student looks and dresses like a teen model ready for a night of club hopping with Lindsay Lohan. Heck, most of the male students attend class with their shirts wide open to show off their chiseled physiques. Control yourself already, Mr. DeCoteau.
Christine attends a parapsychology class just as all pre-med chemistry majors do. A slumming Barbara Crampton, who I am absolutely 100% convinced had to be doing this movie as a favor for someone, plays the parapsychology professor that uncovers Christine’s latent psychic powers through a highly improbable test requiring her to arrange a series of numbers on a computer screen using only her mind. Her ability to do so means that Christine can use her extraordinary psychic abilities to manipulate digitized data streams, a mental power I haven’t seen attempted in a motion picture since Scanner Cop. Oh, if only if this movie was Scanner Cop.
Christine also has other psychic abilities too. She can make her eyes glow for no reason and make candles light up for the heck of it. None of her psychic powers are ever really delved into nor are they ever used as part of the story, except for her inexplicable ability to shoot unexplained rays of poorly digitized computer animation at the movie’s villainess at just the right moment. That’s always a handy super power.
Evil is afoot on campus and Christine’s professor wants her to help fight it by going undercover in the BATS (Beta Alpha something or other, I forget, but the “B” should instead stand for “Bacardi” seeing as how they both share the same identical bat logo), the hottest sorority on campus, not to mention the most evil. The BATS are led by a sinfully hot demoness named Devin, who likes to corrupt innocent freshmen by leading them down a dark path that includes skipping class, partying too much, drinking alcohol, and engaging in carnal activities. One question; what exactly makes this sorority any different from any other sorority out there? Oh wait, I forgot. They’re evil!
The BATS also have a strict dress code. All members must dress entirely in slinky black ensembles with matching make-up and nail polish, and they have to wear dark sunglasses even when in class. It’s hilarious to hear someone comment on how gorgeous Christine looks after she gets her BATS makeover because she looks exactly the same except she’s wearing more make-up.
No sooner does the teacher convince her into trying to join the BATS, the sorority invites her to pledge. No sooner does she accept their invitation, she almost immediately falls under their spell. No sooner does she fall under their spell, she comes to realize how truly evil they are and talks of stopping them, at least until she begins falling under their spell again. Rinse and repeat until the climactic showdown at the initiation ceremony where Devin’s demise happens so fast and so easily I could only shake my head knowing I had wasted 80-minutes of my life watching this pointless dreck.
Along the way we get yet more poorly thought out scenes and subplots involving Christine’s jealous roommate who desperately wants to join the BATS, as well as Christine’s hunky dork (A male model type wearing black rimmed glasses so they can call him a geek) of a potential boyfriend who himself ends up falling under Devin’s spell.
About an hour in, the movie pulls some incredibly idiotic stuff out of thin air about whom the professor really is and what Devin had to do with the death of Christine’s parents. This revelation about her parents again drove home how much this movie smelled of having been written on the fly because the topic of her parents had never been brought up before. I could go on discussing other scenes where things are introduced without ever being explained or followed up on.
There is one thing that could have saved this movie – hot naked lesbian sex! DeCoteau couldn’t even get that part right. Hell, even Jim Wynorski can get that much right.
I think I speak for every heterosexual male when say that if you’re going to make an R-rated film loaded with hot girls engaging in sex, primarily of the lesbian variety, then, if nothing else, the numerous girl-on-girl make-out sessions should feature ample nudity and not just two or three women in their underwear half-heartedly kissing and rubbing one another in slow motion. I can’t help but wonder if the budget was so low they couldn’t even afford actresses willing to get naked on camera. Nonetheless, the sight of attractive women in their underwear is the only thing that makes the film the slightest bit watchable.
By the way, is it just me or does it seem as if virtually every horror movie that makes female empowerment its central theme ends up with girls making out with one another?
So in the end, you’re left with a horror movie devoid of horror and a softcore porn flick that offers nothing more than some attractive women in their bra and panties heavy petting for minutes at a time. Add to that the barely existent yet still massively convoluted plot, numerous scenes that don’t add up to anything, a director insisting on including flashbacks and flash forwards as visual aids during boring dialogue scenes, God awful fashion show techno music from beginning to end, and a cheat ending that only hammers home how little thought went into the creation of this film.
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