Girls School Screamers

The wealthy owner of a large country estate leaves his house and its contents to a nearby all-girls Catholic college. Seven of the senior girls accompany one of the Sisters to the house to spend four days there cataloguing all the items. However, the house has a dark, tragic past and is rumoured to be haunted by the ghost of a woman who died there forty years ago in mysterious circumstances. Before long one-by-one the girls start to disappear.

This was a Troma release, but apparently one they picked-up rather than produced. Originally made as a straightforward ghost story called The Portrait, Troma decided to do some reshoots once they acquired it and make it a supernatural slasher. The result is pretty underwhelming; the kills are lacklustre, there's no tension, the performances from everyone are poor, there's zero nudity (c'mon, it's an 80s slasher), and the finale is confusing. An opening scene with a kid who's entered the mansion on a dare encountering the ghost is pretty effective, but it's downhill all the way after that. No surprise that this is the only film John P. Finnegan ever directed. 4/10.

My review was written in May 1986 after a Cannes Film Festival Market screening.

"Girls School Screamers", originally titled (more appropriately) "The Portrait", is an utterly routine supernatural horror picture. Bearing a 1984 copyright, the just-released Troma pic has little to offer genre fans.

Plot has been done 100 times before: seven girls from Trinity School in Philadelphia are assigned to spend the weekend at the Tyler Estate mansion (which has been willed to the school) to catalog the artworks there anent an impending sale of the joint. They are killed off one by one, with very fake and pointless makeup effects applied.

Familiar gimmick has Jackie (Mollie O'Mara) apparently the reincarnation (per a matching wall portrait) of Jennifer Welles (no, not the 1970s porno star, just a fictional character), a young woman killed in 1939 in the Tyler mansion by her uncle when she resisted his lecheros advances. The girls' chaperone Sister Urban (Vera Gallagher) was a mother superior back in Jennifer's tiem, as shown in junky flashbacks.

A hurried, incomprehensible finale fails to tie up the dangling plot threads, indicating holemer John P. Finegan and his collaborators were anxious to merely wrap this one up. Screening audience was even more anxious to head for the exits.

Mollie O'Mara in the lead role projects a pleasant personality, but the supporting cast, particularly male performers, is weak. Technical credits are perfunctory, film delivers none of the genre's expected nudity and scares are absent.

Beautiful girls alone in a haunted mansion try raising the spirit of a girl who lived there 40 years ago. Good story filled with average actors. Definitely worth a look.

Troma of course! The movie starts very well but soon it falls and turns into a disaster. The first scene shows a bunch of boys trespassing a supposedly haunted house, when one of them enters, he is scared the hell out by a woman dressed in white. To that point, the movie was promising but after the woman's face is shown the movie turns very cheesy and stays that way until the end. The movie has some really cheesy gore effects and the ghost appearances are also laughable.

The settings are kind of creepy but cannot handle the whole movie. There are also some creepy looking scenes but that's not enough to make a Horror movie good. In fact, the movie gets boring at some point and the viewer stops caring about it.

I watched this long time ago in USA NETWORK and now that I've recently seen it, I cannot understand why it aired every month! Stay out of it even if you are a fan of B-movies. This one does not have an attitude or even moments to make fun of.

This movie looked like something that I wouldn't ever want to see but after being faced with a tough choice, I chose this one. I'm glad I did. The acting wasn't the best and the plot (though original) could've been honed but there were some surprises which left me with my jaw hanging open. It was pretty good so I gave it a 5 out of 10.