Nightmare Sisters (1988)


director: David DeCoteau
release-year: 1988
genres: horror, comedy, sexploitation
countries: USA
languages: English

From David DeCoteau, the writer or producer of no fewer than 6 Puppet Master films, starting from Puppet Master II. Most of his dozens and dozens of films don't have wikipedia pages, and quite a lot of them are sorority-themed sexploitation horror.

That's six strikes.

It opens with a Mallrats-style mall psychic (albeit probably with only two nipples), who dons a fake Indian accents and scams a lady who is confused about why her cheating husband turned into a pile of ash. He makes silly noises and silly accents and overly-exaggerated facial expressions, and the scene goes on for much too long and doesn't introduce the story or characters. The background music is some pretty nice freestyling sitar over a theremin.

Later we will learn that this is the best scene.

Demon hands reach out of his crystal ball and rip his head off, and his decapitated head sings in a scratch "wazzuuuuuuupppp" voice, and I don't think that scene had anything to do with the movie. A really nice horror-themed punk rock song by L.A. band Haunted Garage plays over the otherwise boring red-text-on-black-background opening credits. I wish the movie would simply end at the end of the credits, because I know it won't be getting better than this.

Never touch the ball.

We meed the three sorority girls who will become our Nightmare Sisters. They're three ultra-nerds with frumpy clothes, hobbies they're bad at, and lamentations about lacks of boyfriend. What they are absolutely the worst at, though, is delivering their lines. Particularly the farmer girl, oof. The antiquing nerd comes home from the antique shop with a skull goblet and a crystal ball.

I would also buy a skull goblet.

All of their sorority sisters are out for the weekend. The girls think they should throw a party, but they are nerds and don't know any people. They call the three nerd boys they kind of know, who are only slightly better at acting. Some stupid overly-long scene with their even worse-acting frat brothers explains why the nerdy boys aren't allowed to go to the party, but they go to the party. They all nerd around for a while.

Nerding in the 80s just meant playing Twister.

They have a scéance with the antiques, and accidentally summon the fake Indian from the first scene (who is also the frontman of Haunted Garage). He, again, has an excessively long scene of explaining things uninterestingly. He possesses the girls with some hand-drawn ghostbusters proton beams, and they instantly become topless, oiled, and sexy. The guys remain nerds.

Don't cross the streams!

The audio gets really bad at this point. They must have broken their only good microphone. The nerd boys' frat brothers peek in the window and see the sexy naked ladies and start scheming something stupid and complicated. It goes on too long, as is the trend, and you can barely make out what they're even saying.

They could cut the audio completely and it would be an improvement.

It gives up on having a plot for a while and just has scenes of the naked girls rubbing on each other in a playful, sexless manner. This is from a pre-internet age, when people had limited options. It goes on and on and on and on and on. Then it switches to a kind of clip show of the girls trying to seduce the nerds in various costumes. The nerds are awkward and scared and turn them down at every turn. Large portions of this section are out of focus.

The tub scene apparently led to rescuing this film from obscurity.

The frat bros start kidnapping the nerds and trying to sleep with the girls, but the girls turn demonic, bite their dicks off, and burn them to ashes. The nerds try to warn them not to sleep with the demon-possessed, but bros will be bros.

Never trust a woman with a tarzan room.

The boys call an exorcist, and the speech volume doubles when he arrives, as if he brought a new microphone with him and they don't know how to set the gain level. The exorcist scene goes on – get this – way too long. Absurdly too long. Maybe these are supposed to be comedy bits, but they aren't comedic; they just blather. One hundred years later, they capture the girls and perform an excessively long exorcism.

Captured in some extension cords or something.

The succubus demon comes out of them in the form of a rubber mask with a wig. They talk too much for too long. How can an 80-minute movie feel so long? It has, maximum, 10 minutes of movie. They smash the crystal ball and live happily ever after as nerds, or whatever, who cares, it's finally over.

My face after watching this movie.