The movie begins with an unexpected, and probably unnecessary, animated sequence which explains how the main character made it to the titular "Princess Academy". It does this pretty badly, and the animation is poor.
The movie is actually a rarity in '80s boob comedies in that its main characters are female. Usually they are about boys trying to get laid. It remains to be seen what, if any, difference this will make.
It's the usual ragtag assortment of cell-mates - the tough girl, the posh one, the poor one, and whatever else - at the rich school, where the teacher is a tough bull-dyke. She patrols the grounds with a shotgun.
In one extraordinary scene, the three main girls put 'itching powder' on the other girls' tampons. I don't even want to think about that - and I'm a man. This actually could have been played for very tasteless laughs, but the movie doesn't have the guts to go there. We just get girls squeezing their legs together, and running out of the room. A possibly memorable scene is squandered.
The movie seriously stumbles at the half-hour mark, when the girls' school meets a boys' school and has a snowball fight. A scene where a girl gets stuck in a port-a-potty, and the port-a-potty slides down a hill and ends up in a tree, is spectacularly unconvincing.
In another scene, a girl apparently ingests horse faeces.
The film is dominated by the unpleasant feeling of jokes either completely missing their target, or failing to register as attempted jokes at all. Too much of that borders on surrealism, like you are watching a movie made by aliens from another planet. Case in point: in one scene, a boy and girl strip off in a bedroom, down to their underwear, while strange music plays. They sit next to each other, and start making weird, braying noises. I started thinking, oh, I get it: they're only pretending to have sex, so anyone listening thinks they're really doing it. But no. They jump on each other. Scene over. What are we supposed to make of this? Is it supposed to be funny that they started making sex noises before actually having sex?
This is an '80s sex comedy, supposedly, so you know the only reason anyone will ever watch it is for nudity. And you know what? It doesn't really have any. The only boobs in the movie are on the margins of the shot, making it hard to see them. The filmmakers paid this actress extra to bare her breasts. Why the hell did they not actually let us see them?
A scene where the girls use a tank to break some boys out of jail at the end of the movie is totally unprecedented. It's as badly shot as the rest of the movie, but that doesn't matter. How they get a tank, and why the boys are in jail, is so badly explained that these scenes could have been directed by David Lean, and you'd still be sitting there asking yourself those questions.
And then it's over: thank god.
