Girls School Screamers

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.

Is there any other film company that has released quite as many stinkers as Troma? Girls School Screamers is yet another woeful offering sent to test the mettle of hardened movie masochists, the movie delivering very little worthy of mention.

The uninspired plot sees seven Catholic School girls sent to a creepy mansion where they are to catalogue the art collection of the late Tyler Welles. Whilst there, the girls hold a seance to contact the spirit of Tyler's niece Jennifer, who died in mysterious circumstances. A not particularly interesting mystery unravels and one-by-one the girls are bumped off by an unseen killer.

Diabolical acting, pedestrian directing, virtually no gore and zero nudity from the girls (T&A is usually a given for a Troma movie) all go to make this an absolute clunker. Oh, and only one of the girls actually screams, to the best of my recollection.

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.

Of course I knew to keep expectations extremely low for "Girl School Murders". Obviously I spotted the bad rating and harshly negative reviews here on IMDb, and I'm naturally also well aware of Troma's questionable reputation as a production/distributor company. And yet, in spit of all this, the incurable horror geek in me still found the rather pricy purchase was justified even if only to own that utterly cool DVD-cover in my collection! You know, the one with the girl's rotten face that has worms crawling out of it. I just wish the film itself was half as awesome as the poster image! But, on the contrary, "Girl School Screamers" is easily one of the weakest and most forgettable slasher efforts of the entire eighties. It certainly has potential, though. The opening sequences, features a young boy trespassing into an old dark house and running into an eerie ghost on the staircase, is surprisingly grim and atmospheric but, unfortunately, it's the only real highlight. The spooky house is donated, via a last will and testament, to a Catholic college for girls, and seven fresh-faced students are promptly recruited to go and clean it over the weekend. It turns out that a beautiful young girl tragically died in the house nearly forty years ago and, moreover, she looks exactly like one of the students. They subsequently get killed off one by one, but this is where the film truly fails to live up to its potential, as the murders are mundane, uninspired, bloodless and often even occurring off-screen. The acting performances are lamentable, and so is everything else; - period. But hey, the DVD has a prominent spot on the eighties-shelf of my collection!

This Troma release is bad --- but not in the good way the Toxic Avenger, Tromeo & Juliet, and The Killer Condom were. Instead it is a just mediocre ‘80s slasher meets the co-eds' film. This time 7 students of an all-girl college go to the mansion of a recently deceased millionaire. This fellow has left his valuable art collection to the school and it is up to these brave girls to catalogue it. But these students are not the all-work and no-play type; they fill their evenings with dope-smoking, Bud drinking, boyfriend smuggling, and seances. Unfortunately the benefactors' sorted past eventually makes their stay in the house miserable Scooby-Doo style. The major problem with this movie is over and over again characters make extremely far fetched decisions (even for campy 80s slasher films). My favorite was when the boyfriend decided to check out the local newspaper's back issues because he was curious about the owner. What?? Who does that?? For those who care: the gore and nudity quotient is very low. The one saving aspect of this film is the performance of the Old Nun that accompanies the girls. She achieves a kind of excellence in this film that nearly matches the likes of horror legend Don Barret's work in Slaughterhouse. Skeeter does love his schlocky horror and gives Girls' School Screamers 6 for 10!