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.
