La Main du Démon

I caught this on USA while I was home sick with the flu. Even though I was half awake and in a daze, I enjoyed it. Pamela Franklin was likable as a young woman who enrolls in the exclusive Salem Academy under a false name, in order to investigate the strange death of her sister Martha, who had gone to school there. Once she arrives, she meets up with strange faculty and students, and eerie occurences. There are great shots of Pamela crawling the hallways at night with a lantern in her hand as a storm rages outside, and there is an eerie climax. Catch this one if you can. I haven't seen the remake yet.

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.

I have to admit it - I've had a crush on Pamela Franklin since 1964 (A Tiger Walks). I was about ten at the time and I even wrote to disney asking for a photo of her. They sent me an 8x10 glossy of young Pamela -FOR FREE !! It came with nice letter on Disney stationary thanking ME for asking for the photo. It hung in my room for a while until I realized there were real girls out there!

I finally got around to seeing SSFG after all these decades. It came out just as I was getting out of High School almost half a century ago. It rekindled my heart-throb for Pamela. She looked so cute in this film I found myself at age 19 (1973) wondering what it would have been like to have known her. Silly...I know! She was just adorable.

She hasn't acted in years and I understand she and her husband run a book store in Hollywood now. I just find it a interesting human oddity that someone's image and persona -an actress - can get embedded in one's psyche as a child and still be there with the same regard so many years later. I guess that is the magic of cinema.

The movie is not much of a blockbuster and is obviously dated but it was fun to go along with it and watch these young actresses perform so earnestly. Seeing Pamela as a beatiful young woman made it all worth it.

This horror "masterpiece" has gone unrecognised and forgotten for so many years, but in fact it's an UNFORGETTABLE MOVIE! It reminded me of 1980 movie Friday The 13th, which is quite well-known as a "classic" horror flick (so to speak). But this movie was made seven years before, and is a lot better. If only this movie hadn't been ignored for so many years, then it may have been a "classic" today, with Halloween, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare On Elm Street.

A definite for horror lovers. It's a perfect 666, not any more, not any less. Not 665 or 667, but 666.

I would give it a 9.5/10. Well worth watching...

Following the mysterious suicide of her sister, a young woman enrolls herself in the girl's college she was attending to investigate what really happened.

This 70's telefilm can sort of be looked at as an earlier, far less extravagant version of "Suspiria". After a strong opening, emphasis is firmly placed on the investigation aspect. We get a solid cast, as was often the case in these old TV efforts. Pamela Franklin, so good in "And Soon the Darkness" and "Legend of Hell House", plays the lead role of investigating sibling. Also present is the lovely Kate Jackson, as well as Cheryl Ladd under a different name. It's interesting seeing these two together before they would later go on to star opposite each other in "Charlie's Angels". Not too surprising when you consider that both this movie and that show were Spelling productions.

There are some good moments here, but a few too many scenes of exploring dark corridors slow the film considerably. The ending is predictable, but I suppose that's to be expected given the title. It's worth a look, but don't expect one of the better TV horrors.