Girls School Screamers

I decided to go to the video shop and hire out a few horror movies i havnt seen,i couldnt see many good ones so i picked this and thought it would suck,but i watched it last night and i was impressed,it started off funny with the ghost,some of the acting was so bad you just had to laugh,alot of the killings are good,didnt like the meat cleaver part but,i recommend this if you want a cheap B-grade movie,i give it 7/10.

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.

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.

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.

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.