​CEMETERY SISTERS (1987) - A FILM GUTTER REVIEW

Dir. Nick Philips, USA, 56 mins

Oh yes, it's time for more shot on video goodness – and today it's time to visit some familiar territory...

I keep telling myself that I won't got back to the works of Nick Philips, one of the most notorious directors of cheaply made slashers throughout the 80s and 90s. It's like saying you'll only watch one more TV show on your box set binge, or that you're only going to have more sweet out of the share bag. You know it's not good for you, and you know you shouldn't really, but you somehow can't help yourself.

In the first six months of the year I had the pleasure of checking our four other Philips features – Criminally Insane 1 and 2, Doctor Bloodbath and Satan's Black Wedding. One of many pseudonyms for director Nick Millard, who also worked on a host of sex films and action movies, the Philips moniker is likely the best-known and notorious for shot on video slashers. All four of those offerings were terrible in varying degrees, and in the bad habit of 'recycling' clips from each other to pad out the already short running times, which begs the question even more... why I am back here? I can only put it down to a morbid sense of curiosity.

Which brings us to Cemetery Sisters, the story of two young sisters who grew up in with their father working in a mortuary and as such developed an unhealthy obsessions with death. Their living these days is hooking in unsuspecting men from the dating sections of newspapers (way before your online dating here), marrying them, killing them and copping the money and goods that they owned. That's established in about the first three minutes, so that's no spoiler – what is strange is just how quickly this process seems to happen, with the ladies looking like they have a new victim each week. Anyway, the real trouble begins when the girls' aunt comes to stay, and the girls have a body upstairs in the bedroom they haven't gotten rid of just yet...

Cemetery Sisters has so many of the Philips hallmarks that there's something weirdly comfortable about it – a familiar cast of actors (including a lady whom I now realise is Mrs Millard playing auntie, as well as having been in Doctor Bloodbath), lame-looking death sequences, some really hokey performances and of course the reuse of footage from other movies, with flashbacks to one of our leads watching Criminally Insane and Satan's Black Wedding as a kid. Honestly, if I had seen those two as a youngster, I think it would have disturbed me just the same...

Then part of me started to speculate that maybe Philips had jumped the gun on Marvel by developing his own Philips-verse, with the actors who occurred in multiple films actually playing the same character. Why couldn't auntie here also have been the wife of the mass-murdering doctor in Doctor Bloodbath later down the line? Many of the stories take place in the very same house – maybe it's been passed from one serial killer to another because it's actually got some kind of curse hanging over it? Maybe the sister who also appeared in Doctor Bloodbath was really the same character, and met her grisly end there after this movie?

OK, maybe it's coming to a point where I've seen too many of these films, but you have to find some way to kill the time while this hour of your life is burned away for absolutely nothing. As is almost invariable, there's little here to redeem this one. It looks cheaply made – in no small part because it is cheaply made – and as always feels so rushed in how it's put together that you wonder why there was sometimes such a big gap between Philips offerings. You could be charitable and say this was an era where slashers were often turned out cheap and quick, but Cemetery Sisters does little to improve on any of the previous offerings from the director. It's actually weirdly and eminently possible the director made money on these, because it's hard to think they spent much putting them together before they went to market...

RATING: 2/10. I'll concede that this is not the worst of Philips' slashers, nor is it the best – that honour still remains with the 3/10 awarded to Satan's Black Wedding. The lead actresses at least look like they're having fun with the material, and there are a couple of moments that made me chuckle, deliberately or otherwise. Again it falls into the category of 'has to be seen to be believed' rather than being 'must watch', with a poor 2/10.