★ 6 / 10
_**Pamela Franklin and Kate Jackson are students at
Wuchak
_**Pamela Franklin and Kate Jackson are students at a dubious all-girls school**_ A young woman (Pamela Franklin) enrolls in an all-girls academy in Salem…
_**Pamela Franklin and Kate Jackson are students at a dubious all-girls school**_
A young woman (Pamela Franklin) enrolls in an all-girls academy in Salem, Massachusetts, to find out what provoked her sister’s death. Things get creepier and creepier. Jamie Smith-Jackson, Kate Jackson and Cheryl Ladd play students while Jo Van Fleet is on hand as the headmistress and Roy Thinnes an art professor.
"Satan's School for Girls" (1973) is a TV horror flick that inspired “Suspiria” (1977) and the 2000 remake (or reimagining) of the same title. Pamela Franklin is fine as the protagonist, but she never did much for me personally; the same with Jackson.
Meanwhile the fashions of the early 70s are pretty horrendous, yet the underwhelming story does slowly build and has some effectively creepy sequences with people lurking through dark abodes with lanterns during a storm.
The Spanish-style Academy is the only real issue, which really takes the viewer out of the story because it's impossible to view the structure as something built in New England in the 1600s, let alone at the time of the story. Of course the filmmakers were forced to use what was available in SoCal since this was a limited-budget production.
In the 2000 remake the filmmakers used a more accurate-looking school, shot at John Abbott College, near Montréal, Québec. Kate reappears in that one as the dean. Check it out.
Kate Jackson and Cheryl Ladd would of course team-up in a few years for Charlie's Angels (1976).
The movie runs about 1 hour, 14 minutes, and was shot in SoCal as follows: 20th Century Fox Studios, Century City; King Gillette Ranch, Malibu Creek State Park, Calabasas; and Mulholland Highway, Cornell (the opening sequence with Martha at the phone booth).
GRADE B-/C+
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★ 6 / 10
The bad parts are pretty bad, but the good parts are creepy as hell.
Anonymous_Maxine
This made for TV horror thriller is a lot better than it's ridiculous title would have you believe, which is really saying something since the title is…
This made for TV horror thriller is a lot better than it's ridiculous title would have you believe, which is really saying something since the title is actually a pretty apt description of what goes on in the movie. It starts out with a girl acting really strangely, running away something that isn't identified and then turning up dead. Her sister doesn't accept the police's quick decision to label it a suicide and close the case. Surely there is plenty of evidence to suggest that they are right, but then again, they don't take supernatural explanations into account so her sister Elizabeth decides to take the investigation into her own hands.Suspicious that the girl's school that her sister attended at the time of her death may have had something to do with what happened to her, Elizabeth enrolls into the school to do some investigating of her own. I don't know how fresh the idea of that premise was in 1973, but it works pretty well here. There are some slip-ups, like when Elizabeth meets the Head Mistress for an interview and spouts some nonsense like "Picasso was a realist painter before he was an impressionist." Not that I don't accept that someone her age would have any knowledge about that (it is, after all, not exactly the kind of knowledge reserved for geniuses), it's just that it's so out of place in this movie. I guess I should respect such an attempt at three dimensional characterization though. Horror movies are, after all, historically lacking in this area.I got Satan's School for Girls on a 10-movie collection that I bought for $15, since I have something of a love of old, crappy horror movies (and you can't beat that price!), otherwise I would never have seen it. To be sure, this is one of those movies that is actually worth watching but has a title that is incredibly efficient in making people want to see it. Who would want to watch a movie with a title like this? I imagine that's part of the reason that the remake with Shannon Dougherty came and went instantaneously with little to no attention. And this really is unfortunate, because the movie certainly has some tense moments. The scene where Elizabeth goes searching the basement for the room where the painting of her sister took place is wonderfully creepy. Even that painting itself is a great prop.The psychology teacher in the movie is a little too obvious. I think it's safe to say that no character should ever act as evil or nutty as this guy did. When he's not threatening girls with a huge knife he's making rats go insane in his lab. This guy can NOT be well balanced. It actually is a pretty clever technique to have designed the cavernous basement like the rat maze in his classroom, but if the person acting insane turns out to be the bad guy then the movie is too predictable, and if they turn out to be completely innocent then it becomes too clear that the movie was trying to deliberately lead you in the wrong direction, which in turn requires a Scooby-Doo ending because they need to explain why we were wrong the whole time in thinking exactly what they wanted us to think.The movie takes something of a downturn in the third act, as the cheesy acting starts to tip the scales against the creepy atmosphere, which is no longer creepy enough to justify overlooking how bad the acting is. There is a ludicrous scene where the professor can't get out of a pond because there are girls all around him poking him with sticks. If they had established earlier on that he can't swim, fine, but any warm-blooded human being, man or woman, would have simply grabbed onto the first stick that poked him or her and yanked the girl holding it right into the pond. It would not be hard to do, obviously. But there I go nitpicking. I just have a hard time with scenes like that. It's like when someone takes a person hostage, holding a gun to their head while the whole police force stands with their guns aimed, and they all drop their guns like incompetent morons. In all my years of movie watching, only twice have I seen anybody acknowledge how effective it would be to just shoot the guy (one was RoboCop, and the other was Charlie Sheen in Navy Seals). You wouldn't even have to kill him, Shooting the gunman in the arm would usually not endanger the victim at all and would completely incapacitate the gunman from being able to fire. There I go nitpicking AGAIN. Stop me next time, will you? I don't remember there being any shooting in Satan's School for Girls (although there is a gun), and there is little to no gore either, the movie is almost solely driven by its atmosphere, which most of the time is not very effective but a few times is VERY effective. For 70s horror, this is definitely one of the better ones (excluding the giants, like The Exorcist, which are, of course, in a class all their own). Certainly worth seeing for horror buffs.
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★ 6 / 10
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BandSAboutMovies
Satan ran the early 70s. I first learned about Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan as a child by reading the TV Guide Book of Lists. They asked him what the…
Satan ran the early 70s. I first learned about Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan as a child by reading the TV Guide Book of Lists. They asked him what the most Satanic TV shows were and he replied with a list that included so many of my favorite shows. It scared me as a twelve year old — could I be taken by devil worshippers and be made to celebrate the Black Mass?Made for TV movies reflected the Satanic bent of the early 70s. This Aaron Spelling produced, David Lowell Rich (Eye of the Cat, Airport 79 – The Concorde) directed affair brings the devil to the boarding school, along with plenty of attractive girls ready to give their souls to the Son of the Morning Star.Martha Sayers is running from a mysterious stranger who may or may not be related to Torgo from Manos: the Hands of Fate. She locks herself in her sister Elizabeth's (Pamela Franklin, Necromancy, The Legend of Hell House, The Food of the Gods) house and hangs herself. Of course, the police just think it's a suicide. But we know better — The Salem Academy for Women had to have something to do with it. Martha's roommate tells Elizabeth to stay away, but she is having none of it.She takes the name of Elizabeth Morgan and enrolls at the school where she's welcomed by Roberta (Kate Jackson!), Jody Keller (Cherly Ladd!) and Debbie Jones (Jamie Smith-Jackson from Go Ask Alice, who is married to Michael Ontkean, Sheriff Harry S. Truman from Twin Peaks). The fact that Alice and two of Charlie's Angels (Sabrina Duncan and Kris Munroe, I'll have you know) playing devils in a movie thrills me to no end. And throw in Alice and we have a movie!Read more at http://bit.ly/2yALwjp
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