Satan's School for Girls

With a rather low score of 5.1 and a silly title, I expected "Satan's School for Girls" to be a lousy film. However, this made for TV picture actually hols up pretty well and I have no idea why its score is this low. In fact, I strongly suspect that this film was the inspiration for the Dario Argento classic "Suspiria".

When the film begins, Martha is on the run...being pursued by some unseen enemy. She eventually makes it to her sister's home but when Elizabeth arrives home, she finds Martha dead and hanging in the house! Martha had never been suicidal and despite the police ruling it a suicide, she decides to investigate. The trail leads to a weird 'girls' school (many of the actresses are 23-30) where there is a very strange sense of foreboding and some rather weird dealings. What is going on here?!

In many ways, it reminds me of "Suspiria". Both are set at a women's school and both have a great sense of foreboding instead of actually scary stuff happening most of the time. Both lead to similar finales as well. Plus, if you see it, you get to see "Charlie's Angels" stars of the future, Kate Jackson and Cheryl Ladd, as two of the girls enrolled in this bizarro school. Worth seeing.

OK, everybody is always ragging on made-for-TV movies because yes, more often than not, they are really cheesy. But keep in mind made-for-TV movies are made-for-TV, so they are, of course, made on a much smaller budget. However, this is one TV film that rises above its low-budget status. This, for the most part, has to do with the supremely talented cast involved. '70's Scream Queen Pamela Franklin, fresh out of Richard Matheson's nail-biting, edge-of-your-seat suspense thriller THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE, stars as a young woman who enrolls in a distinguished all-girls' school to probe her sister's mysterious suicide. The plot reminds me of Dario Argento's horror classic SUSPIRIA, but this TV movie was actually made four years before Argento's film, so perhaps Argento pilfered from this little seen gem. Kate Jackson and Cheryl Ladd, before they became 'Charlie's Angels', co-starred as two of Franklin's fellow classmates. Incidentally, Jackson later played the Jo Van Fleet role of THE HEADMISTRESS in the 2000 remake. Aaron Spelling produced both versions.

This is another movie which I have looked for over the years to see on latenight channels but is no longer available I believe. I really liked this because it had an overall scary plot running throughout the movie. Both of my kids, (Nate and Ryann like these types of movies and they are at the right age to spot good quality. I hope if anyone knows if this is still being shown around the country to let me know because I can't find it for anything. If you get a change to watch it, by all means do so. It will not let you down and is a little above a B grade movie. Look at how young all the pre Charlie's Angels are in this flick... Enjoy!

This made for TV horror thriller is a lot better than it's ridiculous title would have you believe, which is really saying something since the title is actually a pretty apt description of what goes on in the movie. It starts out with a girl acting really strangely, running away something that isn't identified and then turning up dead. Her sister doesn't accept the police's quick decision to label it a suicide and close the case. Surely there is plenty of evidence to suggest that they are right, but then again, they don't take supernatural explanations into account so her sister Elizabeth decides to take the investigation into her own hands.

Suspicious that the girl's school that her sister attended at the time of her death may have had something to do with what happened to her, Elizabeth enrolls into the school to do some investigating of her own. I don't know how fresh the idea of that premise was in 1973, but it works pretty well here. There are some slip-ups, like when Elizabeth meets the Head Mistress for an interview and spouts some nonsense like "Picasso was a realist painter before he was an impressionist." Not that I don't accept that someone her age would have any knowledge about that (it is, after all, not exactly the kind of knowledge reserved for geniuses), it's just that it's so out of place in this movie. I guess I should respect such an attempt at three dimensional characterization though. Horror movies are, after all, historically lacking in this area.

I got Satan's School for Girls on a 10-movie collection that I bought for $15, since I have something of a love of old, crappy horror movies (and you can't beat that price!), otherwise I would never have seen it. To be sure, this is one of those movies that is actually worth watching but has a title that is incredibly efficient in making people want to see it. Who would want to watch a movie with a title like this? I imagine that's part of the reason that the remake with Shannon Dougherty came and went instantaneously with little to no attention. And this really is unfortunate, because the movie certainly has some tense moments. The scene where Elizabeth goes searching the basement for the room where the painting of her sister took place is wonderfully creepy. Even that painting itself is a great prop.

The psychology teacher in the movie is a little too obvious. I think it's safe to say that no character should ever act as evil or nutty as this guy did. When he's not threatening girls with a huge knife he's making rats go insane in his lab. This guy can NOT be well balanced. It actually is a pretty clever technique to have designed the cavernous basement like the rat maze in his classroom, but if the person acting insane turns out to be the bad guy then the movie is too predictable, and if they turn out to be completely innocent then it becomes too clear that the movie was trying to deliberately lead you in the wrong direction, which in turn requires a Scooby-Doo ending because they need to explain why we were wrong the whole time in thinking exactly what they wanted us to think.

The movie takes something of a downturn in the third act, as the cheesy acting starts to tip the scales against the creepy atmosphere, which is no longer creepy enough to justify overlooking how bad the acting is. There is a ludicrous scene where the professor can't get out of a pond because there are girls all around him poking him with sticks. If they had established earlier on that he can't swim, fine, but any warm-blooded human being, man or woman, would have simply grabbed onto the first stick that poked him or her and yanked the girl holding it right into the pond. It would not be hard to do, obviously.

But there I go nitpicking. I just have a hard time with scenes like that. It's like when someone takes a person hostage, holding a gun to their head while the whole police force stands with their guns aimed, and they all drop their guns like incompetent morons. In all my years of movie watching, only twice have I seen anybody acknowledge how effective it would be to just shoot the guy (one was RoboCop, and the other was Charlie Sheen in Navy Seals). You wouldn't even have to kill him, Shooting the gunman in the arm would usually not endanger the victim at all and would completely incapacitate the gunman from being able to fire.

There I go nitpicking AGAIN. Stop me next time, will you? I don't remember there being any shooting in Satan's School for Girls (although there is a gun), and there is little to no gore either, the movie is almost solely driven by its atmosphere, which most of the time is not very effective but a few times is VERY effective. For 70s horror, this is definitely one of the better ones (excluding the giants, like The Exorcist, which are, of course, in a class all their own). Certainly worth seeing for horror buffs.

Can someone take on the challenge of restoring and preserving all those 'made for TV' movies from the 60's and 70's? Here we have a curious masterpiece... a young woman goes snooping at a spooky American private girls' school in 1973, and gets more than she bargained for.

Pamela Franklin plays like a prototype Winona Ryder, short and short-haired amidst the tall, long-haired 'California' girls. Having spent much of her career playing skewed or disturbed British girls, here she is the 'straight' heroine, years before all those current Britishers took on the dialogue coach.

She confronts not one but TWO Jacksons, Kate and Jamie Smith-. Both were striking and imposing, both tall and long-haired... and when contrasted with poor Cheryl Stoppelmoor, both quite fascinating. Jamie is quite captivating playing the freaked and frightened Debbie. Kate is a mess of contradictions - beautiful yet straight-laced (check the night-gowns - Jamie sports a slinky red number, Kate is buttoned up in high neck and frills)... one Jackson sadly retired (as did Franklin - why?), the other unwisely shyed away from unsympathetic roles and found fame as a glam' detective (in polo-necks and neck-covering scarves).

Ultimately not the best entry in 1973's TV movie offerings, yet in the 21st century it's worth a look for the fantastic casting choices!