Poor Terry Lumley. Driving around in a frantic state, trying to reach her sister by phone, and feeling like she's being stalked like some rat caught in a trap with a cat lurking nearby. Approached by some unseen creature of darkness, she begins to scream, and all of a sudden, she turns into what looks like a Dali painting, her thin face becoming as equally horrific as the fate she is about to meet. This sets up the rest of this somewhat silly 1970's T.V. movie which has a cult following and includes such familiar faces as Pamela Franklin (as the poor victim's sister), Kate Jackson (as a student who becomes Franklin's pal when she enrolls to try and find out what happened to her sister), Roy Thinnes (as a new wave thinker and art professor), Lloyd Bochner (as another eccentric professor), and in a rather campy part, Oscar Winner Joy Van Fleet as the headmistress nicknamed "The Dragon Lady". Van Fleet isn't exactly a dragon lady; In fact, she seems an unwilling participant in the mayhem and macabre goings on, and having given a few camp performances, she is far from as melodramatic as some of those past performances. Certainly, something terrible is going on in the school as half a dozen girls are found dead in the sinister looking basement, and nobody can figure out why, whether it was suicide or murder, and if murder, what kind of motive lead to it. To be honest, I frankly found it dull, and having seen it years ago at a more impressionable age, it doesn't hold up all that well. Many T.V. movies did better jobs with equally horrific tales, most memorably "The Devil's Daughter" and "The Initiation of Sarah", but frankly, they are all the spawns of "Rosemary's Baby".
Review of Satan's School for Girls
Satan's School for Girls
(1973 TV Movie)
Beware of beauty, brains, and breeding. It's all for the spawn of Bealzibub.
10 September 2015
Warning: Spoilers