An initiation task for a pair of pledges as part of a ceremony inducting them into a college sorority goes horribly wrong when a live round finds itself into a gun in a game of Russian Roulette, resulting in the death of a pledge. Years later, the surviving sisters are adults & lead various lives. They are contacted out of the blue for a reunion party in Mexico. But upon arriving at the secluded mansion for the party, they find the place belongs to the dead pledge's father, who is determined to find the person responsible for his daughter's death despite the police ruling it an accident. The sisters & a pair of male gatecrashers find themselves trapped inside the property by electric fence, slowly picked off one by one by the secret killer in their midst.
God bless the dirt-cheap budget DVD labels – how else can you find minor gems like Sisters of Death a good 39 years after its release? I initially thought that the film was going to be a borefest or a cheap telepic drama but once the film started, I saw that Sisters of Death was capable of much more than that.
Sisters of Death is a thriller that may have been made years before the slasher film became a fixture of the genre, but it does have certain elements that would make it a slasher film prototype (HALLOWEEN came out two years later). The plot reads like a slasher film in some regards, although the killer doesn't use knives but various methods to kill their victims & the killer's identity doesn't become clear until the very end, which when seen is an effective surprise. The actors do a good job of carrying the film along, which was a hallmark of the genre at the time – 1970s genre films were a bit talky but made a considerable effort to compose solid stories into their being. The setup is solid & the story is interesting, although it does veer into daytime telepic territory at times. Not a classic by any margin but it does have an interesting story & the twists are pretty novel.
