Girls School Screamers

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.

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.

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.

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!