Stepsisters

Filmed near Peaster, Texas, STEPSISTERS (a.k.a. HANDS OF BLOOD) opens with incoherent, jarring cuts between an ambulance's flashing light, a glum-looking cop, and a spooky old house. We get our first view of down-and-out charter pilot Thorpe Russell (Hal Fletcher): He stumbles out of a cottage, looks back at a woman he spent the night with, and squeezes into his beat-up Hudson for a ride across the prairie to his home. When he arrives, he spots one of his wife Norma's gigolos leaving by the front door. Seeming to forget where's he been, Thorpe accuses Norma of being a slut and angrily threatens her with a gun, but she looks down her nose at him and calmly walks away. These two do nothing but admonish each other for the rest of the movie.

Enter Diana, Norma's half-sister, who at first resents Thorpe's bad attitude but eventually sides with him. We're deep in the heart here, folks, and it's messy business.

Perry Tong's crude melodrama doesn't do a whole lot but the atmosphere is delightfully sleazy, the surprisingly good music score is straight from a honky tonk, and the photography is appropriately washed-out. It's one of those films in which people pour wine out of a jug, smoke a ton of cigarettes and talk about how things have gotten really bad lately.

I knew STEPSISTERS was a wayward winner when, after the main characters scrape through another argument, Thorpe tackles and starts molesting Diana, and she likes it! Unbelievably, she becomes his lover and they conspire to kill Norma. With Norma out of the way, Thorpe can sell off their dilapidated farm and maybe buy himself a better plane.

Tong unsuccessfully tries to generate a murder mystery out of the situation. Character loyalties are unclear until the finale, which should wake up most viewers long enough to finish their popcorn.

Everything and everyone is in decay, so it's no shock when one of the characters literally goes insane. A lot of footage is devoted to people driving around in cars and flying airplanes. The acting is a bit shrill but not bad. Fletcher in particular makes Thorpe more vulgar and cold than the script could possibly have suggested. The locations are excellent.

This film was also released under the title THE TEXAS HILL KILLINGS.

I don't know about anyone else, but I found it really irritating to see two people engaged in conversation and not hear what they say, because two people are having a conversation off screen and we hear that, but don't see them. The, when the two people we see are heard, the camera is off showing a man getting chopped with an axe. Next, we see three people having a conversation, and all we hear is twangy music appropriate for a cheap strip club. Just irritating.

You know, maybe the sound track was just off. It didn't matter as there really wasn't anything going on screen that mattered. Seriously, for a movie about killing stepsisters in Texas, this movie was 90% conversation.

The main problems with this movie are many.

1- it is hard to tell the sisters (Bond Gideon & Sharyn Talbert) apart. This has a little to do with that the two look similar, but more to do with the wierd editing style of the movie that seems to only distinguish the characters when they are apart. When the two sisters are in the same room, it is revealed that they both had lovers, that they both have a connection with the husband, etc...

2- The movie is edited strangely overall, if you can manage to stay awake through the slow pacing and the music that alternates between intriging and awful, you have the take of following one sence with an airplane and the husband to another with one of the sisters and another person. I guess we are supossed to assume that the other person is a man, but rather the only explaination of the editing is that it is in fact her sisters and that they share the same bed (thus explaining the talk of sharing her bed with anyone).

3- Hard to follow and only explainable though lesbianism. The above would seem to lead up to one of the sisters wanting to kill her other sister for both the insurance money and to kill off her lover. This is the plot as indicated, but the twists come in many at the end and they are not all easy to follow.

Basically, all the men die, deaths are blamed on people whom are already dead, or whom you have no clue who they are, the women clean up or at least one of them does (hmm. is she hiding something or framing someone?), and it is shown that at least one woman was in on it. BUT wait, the ending is not that simple, one more person has to die, for reasons unknown and unexplained other than some lesbianism, which may or may not be part of the point of this movie, but it is definitely strange.

Incidentally, the movie contains one interesting tidbit. At one point a sister is calling for the husband. She says a telephone number outloud (713)-594-8604. The number is suposed to be for a hotel room. The number is not a 555 number and it still works, but it is a cell.

Viewed on channel 45 late at night, perhaps the most surprising aspect about the movie though is that it exists and has TV rights.

Rating: 3

The film Stepsisters is in my opinion, a poorly made film that is uninteresting and extremely slow. My friend Ryan dozed several times during the film and I was close to doing so as well. Moreover, believe it or not I found the plot somewhat difficult to follow. The action scenes are not well done. In retrospect, I should have given this movie a rating of 2 rather than 2. I guess I enjoyed some of the songs enough for it to merit the 2 rating.