The Wildcats of St. Trinian's

'Wildcats' is the fifth, last, and easily the worst of the St. Trinians films. Made after a fourteen year gap, it attempts to bring the series up to date, but the results just look too forced.

The plot of the film is simple; the pupils wish to form a trade union in order to demand luxuries from the government. As a premise this could have really worked, and had some good possibilities. But the film just blunders along aimlessly, with a poorly thought out plot, poor dialogue, and wooden characters.

This film lacks the attributes that made its predecessors so successful; in 'Wildcats' the girls seem to lack the confidence, and resourcefulness that has always characterized the classic St.Trinian pupil. The other characters have also been over exaggerated; particularly 'Flash Harry'!! What were the film makers thinking of? why destroy his credibility with that silly hat and satchel?

Overall, I don't recommend this film, there are much better ones to see. 2/10

This movie starts out with a group of younger "fourth-form" girls from the titular "St. Trinian's" girls' school singing a surly rendition of their school song, which is strangely intercut with shots of the more mature "sixth-form" girls doing a sexy dance in unfeasibly short skirts. This strange opening scene is very typical of the strange movie to follow. Not being British, I'm not really familiar with the earlier 50's and 60's "St. Trinian's" films. I know they featured rebellious, cigarette-smoking, working-glass schoolgirls and were not quite as innocuous and family-friendly as something like "The Trouble with Angels". Still they really couldn't have hoped to compete with the saucy, sex-obsessed fare that dominated home-grown British cinema by 1980, and they really shouldn't have tried to.

Not that this is a sexy, "adult" movie by any means. There's a scene where the girls trick their voluptuous gym teacher (perennial British cheesecake actress Louanne Peters) into going for a nude swim and then steal her clothes, which somehow results in her spending the rest of the movie in a clinic bed with a thermometer in her butt (offscreen, of course). There's also a scene where a couple of busty sixth formers (including Debbie Linden from Pete Walker's "Home Before Midnight") pose topless for pictures in the notorious page 3 of the "Sun", which the the dirty old rotters in the Ministry of Education proceed to lecherously drool over. But while this is obviously isn't a children's film, it's hardly a Mary Millington sex flick either. Nor is it even really a "coming-of-age" movie like the American film "Little Darlings" (which it somewhat resembles). The girls, by and large, aren't interested in sex or "losing it", but instead have hatched some half-assed scheme to "unionize" all the girls' schools in Britain and start a "general strike" (Way to belittle the British labor movement of the era!)

Near the end of the movie, Debbie Linden and some of the more sex-obsessed sixth-formers have been "infiltrated" by a group of boys, who are "spies" for the Ministry (don't even ask), and they are all having some kind of half-naked, "petting" party out on a barge. For some reason this threatens the "solidarity" of the "strike", so the younger girls, who are leading the whole thing, dress up as pirates and invade the party, among other things smacking their older schoolmates with wooden swords on their barely-clad bums. I'm not sure if this is supposed to be racy or just funny, but it really isn't either. Like the opening scene, and pretty much the rest of the movie, it mostly just left me kind of agape and wondering exactly what anyone here was thinking when they made this.

Twaddle, Badly scripted, Badly acted And badly directed. A badly thought out attempt to cash in on a successful series. The Characters are wrong, both staff and pupils and the plot line is none existent. The driving force seems to have been the desire to dress women in cartoon school uniforms and leer at them. None of the feigned naive innocence and fun of the other four films is present Every one involved in it should be thoroughly ashamed. Millicent Fritton must be spinning in her grave.

P.S. It is enough to say that when the St. Trinian's films were released as a box set of DVDs this one was not included. Even the distributors at Studio canal cannot of thought it an actual St. Trinian's film.

Wildcats has the reputation of being the lost St Trinian's film, but it would be truer to call it purposely mislaid. The only real problem with it is that it is simply too busy at times: Sheila Hancock really struggles to get any laughs out of Olga Vandemeer because she is given too many riffs to juggle; it is awful to see an excellent and experienced actress left to flounder. Despite the big names in the cast, it is Veronica Quilligan as Lizzie who keeps everything moving, her energy and charisma lifting her scenes and the film as a whole. Wildcats is my favourite St Trinians, I appreciate that puts me in a minority of one, but I have an affection for things that still exist when the world has stopped looking.

"once you have paid him the Dane-geld you never get rid of the Dane." Rudyard Kipling

Well, well, well... St Trinians as political comment. Other reviewers have mentioned this, but it is little wonder that this film flopped in 1980 when it was released upon a trade-union obsessed UK public. The film sends up the trade union movement and strongly critiques any attempt to compromise with the "workers" and meet their demands... a lesson that the 1980's UK government took to heart after the appeasement tactics of the 1970's. Unlike most other reviewers I liked this film: it is a clear and obvious continuation of the original franchise with many character touches lifted directly from the first four films, much more-so than the remakes (updated versions) in 2007 and 2009.

I bought this film because of its reputation - here is a UK film so "appalingly bad" that you can't actually buy it in the UK (my copy had to be bought via the USA but from a UK based-supplier!) - and I was prepared to witness a truly atrocious piece of cinema... Perhaps that mindset helped me to see the good in it where others can only see the bad. This film is a product of its time - much as the originals were. Wildcats from 1980 is similar in style to the Carry On movies minus most (but not all) of the smuttiness and bawdy humour. It is still *very* much a children's film - for UK children.

To me, this film was truer to the original film than the remakes because the driving force behind the girl's mayhem was the "lower sixth form", still wearing silly hats and wielding hockey-sticks, and not the "upper sixth form" in their short skirts and bikinis (and for all those tut-tutting about that... the "sexy" schoolgirls were in the earlier films too... If you watch Wildcats and all you can see are the upper-sixth girls, pro or con, then I can guarantee that *you* are bringing that perspective with you to the film... that said, the opening credits' "dance number" was truly crass). The 2007 and 2009 remakes switched this "upper/lower" dynamic around and let the upper-sixth lead the action far too much - which was a mistake in my opinion.

This film fails - or is rather unintentionally funny - when it lurches over into bizarre racial and gender stereotypes - particularly Harry who is running a "legitimate" Chinese take-away actually disguised as a Chinese man (which he is not) in a truly this-could-only-be-the-70's-or-early-80s sort of way. Or the bimbo fitness instructor (was she actually Swedish or was that just a joke?), or the Dutch headmistress with her box of chocolates - although, to be fair, nobody can follow Alastair Sim as the headmistress and get away with it. Note the underlying theme here: foreigners - welcome to xenophobic England! The acting is more ham-fisted "TV comedy" than "film star" but then again that's also the case with the Carry On films... It is what it is.

Bottom line: slightly better than just "ok". If you like the more raucous UK comedies from the 1970's (and I do) then this will work for you. It is nowhere near as bad as other reviews are making out. I laughed with it and I laughed at it. It's a comedy. And a window into the attitudes of late 1970's UK.