MY CALL: A totally forgettable, but totally serviceable selection for a bad movie night. The gore is weak, the effects are infrequent, but the acting and story are surprising not terrible and there are a few effects scenes that are almost worth the very discounted price of admission. MOVIES LIKE Girls School Screamers: For more campy horror dropping a cast of victims in a haunted mansion, consider The Legacy (1978), Spookies (1986), Doom Asylum (1987), Spellcaster (1988), and Cthulhu Mansion (1992).
First things first. With a title like Girls School Screamers, you’d probably expect a raunchy horror loaded with sex scenes and gratuitous nudity. These elements are completely absent here, and this title is clearly doing this capable campy horror movie a disservice. I almost didn’t watch this based on the title alone! Moreover, this is not the kind of movie that typically dons the Troma label. Truly, this movie is classy when compared to its title and Troma association.
This clunky flick opens with a ghostly woman’s voice luring a preteen deep into her haunted house. Upon cackling revelation, she has a gooey flesh-melty face with writhing worms and all manner of grossness—for low budget b-horror, it’s actually pretty cool. Truth be told, this very screen grab lured me to watch this movie.
The haunted house, along with millions of dollars’ worth of art and other contents, has been willed to the Trinity Girls College. But before they can take custody of the estate, the top seven students and one nun chaperone have been selected to stay there for a weekend and inventory its contents.
A brief séance leads to the discovery that one of the girls shares an uncanny likeness with a long-dead resident of this mansion. Now fascinated by her connection to the house, she reads her historical doppelganger’s old journal and learns more about the history of the mansion’s old family. It seems her wealthy uncle was obsessed with her and was grooming her for eventual seduction and marriage! She rejects his advances and is shoved down the stairs to her death. So what then happened to the incestuous uncle, now also a murderer, you might ask? No clue. Perhaps the end of the movie will tell us.
After the pretty cool and gross opening scene, essentially nothing remotely interesting happens for the next 45 minutes. It’s as if it’s not even a horror movie for this duration. But the movie isn’t so bad that I’m hating life in this absence of horror. I’m just wondering what’s up.
The first death scene is a total throwaway where we don’t see anything juicy… not until they find the ho-hum bloody body. Deaths #2-4 are equally lackluster, involving a meat hook, a worm-covered zombie arm (no clue what’s going on there), and an unmanned car (no clue what’s going on there either). The pitchfork death scene (#6) is equally throwaway bad. The electrocution death (#5), however, was fun, gooey, gross and graphic. I had no idea that being electrocuted could result in melting flesh, facelessness, and dismemberment. That’s a PSA for all you do-it-yourselfers at home.
So who’s doing the killing here? Well, it turns out to be the ghost or somehow undying incestuous uncle! And like Dracula stalking his lost love’s reincarnation, he wants to marry the college girl who bears the likeness of his long-dead niece who had rejected him, using her dead co-eds as bridesmaids that he literally dressed up for the occasion. So… he had the bridemaids’ dresses this whole time?
And how does our reincarnated co-ed defeat this perhaps undead, undying incestuous uncle…? She just pokes him in the eyes with her fingers. That’s it. And now with five of her classmates dead and a confused, tired, elderly nun chaperone, what does she do? No clue. The movie ends with her ominously looking out the window as if she planned on staying there forever. These and so many of the aforementioned details herein make this, in my humble opinion, a delightfully bad movie worthy of any bad movie night. Just be patient between the first awesome scene and the next 45 minutes.
Writer and director John P. Finnegan (Blades) delivers a campy, enjoyably bad movie with pleasantly unawful acting and somewhat decent storytelling.
