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.
