Starring Heather Jacobson, Yara McClay, Owen Szabo, Cassie Daniels, Kelly Musson, Randall Malone

Directed by Lewis Schoenbrun

Slaughterhouse Phi: Death Sisters opens with a shot of St. Katherine's Orphanage with scrolling text telling us the history of this now empty building, how it was destroyed by a fire in the 1940's, and how someone is said to walk the halls of this deserted place. I'm thinking this is all designed to set up the killer being a burn scarred leftover from that tragic fire decades earlier. Nope. Nothing we're told in this opening text has anything whatsoever to do with anything to come aside from a sorority holding its initiation ceremony inside this abandoned orphanage. This is just the first of many story ineptitudes to come. I swear this film's screenplay could make Syd Field weep.

The Tri Phi sorority is holding a mock satanic ceremony to induct their newest members. All the ladies involved are required to dress for the occasion as if they were going to a Halloween lingerie party. The pledges are led to believe that one of them is going to become an actual human sacrifice, something these girls would have to be brainless boobs to believe. They are. Nervous girl Kayla is chosen to be tied to the altar and fake stabbed with a gimmicked knife. She's so convinced it's for real that she dies from fright. Bitchy sorority head Brit decides to cover up the girl's death. One year later, it's pledge time again, but guess who has come back from the dead to take revenge?

I knew this thing was in serious, serious trouble when it suddenly got sidetracked by a pointless subplot involving a creepy photographer that lures a naive young woman to the orphanage for a photo shoot. Zombie Kayla kills them both. I'd say she does so for no reason whatsoever but then no reason whatsoever would also explain the inclusion of this entire sequence and most of the film's story structure in general.

Words cannot truly convey how poor a job this film does setting up the resurrection of Kayla and her motivations for coming back from the dead as an undead zombified killer, which are occasionally interrupted by instances of remorse and the bonds of sisterhood. Things just happen at random. Even by the low standards of today's mindless, no budget, shot on digital slasher movies, this one is embarrassingly incompetent. Slaughterhouse Phi: Death Sisters is the sort of ineptly made slasher flick that gives the whole slasher genre a bad name.

The queen bee of the Tri Phi's is a character named Brit that is clearly patterned after Rachel McAdams' Mean Girls character to the point of even casting an actress who bears a bit of a passing resemblance to her. But Brit is like Rachel McAdams' Mean Girls character taken to the level of R. Lee Ermey's Full Metal Jacket drill sergeant. I swear this poor girl yells 90% of her lines, the majority of which are either insults or barking orders to her Kaley Cuoco look-a-like underling and other assorted sorority sisters. Much of the story is designed to build up to the moment when revenge-minded zombie Kayla exacts bloody vengeance on Brit. One little problem - the movie gives away Brit's death scene in the opening minutes of the film. I can only assume the director decided he wanted to kick things off with an opening kill, but of all the kills he could have chosen, did he have to give away the only one that really matters to the plot? We get to see Brit's slow motion demise twice. The second time, the time when it actually happened within the context of the film and not as a scene tacked on as a prologue, I just wanted to start banging my head against a wall.

Brit is one of the only characters the film attempts to establish as anything other than a warm body. Two others are the Asian pledge from the year before, Akiko, and her boyfriend Lance. After spending the time to build these two up and establish their close relationship, both are quickly killed off and forgotten about. The focus will then shift to Sabine, who was friends with Kayla and regrets having not been a better friend to her, and Lance's horny geeky comic relief friend Paul, who mortifies Sabine by attempting to hit on her even as they're being stalked by a homicidal zombie. And then the film suddenly starts hinting at a potential romance between the two.

Remember what I said about Syd Field weeping? Up that to hang himself.

Then there's the character of the sheriff. He knows that the Tri Phi's covered up whatever happened to Kayla and he's determined to prove it. His method for doing so is to pop up two or three times, get in Brit's face, and tell her he's onto her and will eventually going to prove what she did. Then he completely vanishes from the film until the climax when he shows up just in time to get gutted before the closing credits roll. I have no clue why this character was even included other than to chalk it up to being another example of how pathetic this sad waste of time is. I take that back. I do know why he was included. They wanted to make sure there was an actor... Scratch that. They wanted to make sure there was a human being speaking lines of memorized dialog so horribly beyond the pale of bad acting that it made everyone else in the film seems Shakespearean by comparison.

There is but one bright spot that shown through watching this ordeal. Her name is Yara McClay. Pretty girl, not too bad an actress; I got the feeling she could have made for a perfectly fine scream queen if she had been appearing in a movie worth a damn.

I'm sure the gorehound slasher movie fans out there are wondering about the kills. I know there's a lot of slasher movie aficionados that just require a good amount of blood and guts to be satisfied. Well, the deaths are fairly bloody. Zombie Kayla's weapon of choice is a big obvious plastic prop sickle that she uses to slash and disembowel people with. The deaths pretty much all follow the same formula of a geyser of blood with a few entrails tossed in. That might be enough to satisfy the least discerning gorehounds out there; I, however, was not impressed in the slightest.

But guess what Slaughterhouse Phi: Death Sisters doesn't have? Nudity! You'd think that would be a no brainer but, no, the makers of this film even managed to screw that up. Yeah, the actresses spend most of the movie in some state of undress but we're still talking about a slasher movie involving college girls. Not doing so is like making a Godzilla movie where Godzilla never uses his atomic breath. It's like making a Dirty Harry movie where nobody gets shot. Tits, people, are a time honored tradition for a film like this and not including any is just the final slap in the face.

There's a scene in Slaughterhouse Phi: Death Sisters where the sorority pledges are required to sign personal injury waivers. The DVD for Slaughterhouse Phi: Death Sisters should have come complete with a mental anguish waiver for viewers to sign absolving the filmmakers from any wrongdoing.

1/2 STARS