Deadly Lessons

Starkwater Hall , an exclusive school for girls, is in its summer session when the unimaginable happens - a pupil is found murdered. The headmistress, Miss Wade, is determined to hide the fact and preserve the school's reputation but, when a second killing occurs, the secret is out. Terrified, the remaining girls decide to protect each other from the unseen horror.

This made for TV film has some elements of a slasher or killer on the loose genre, but where it differs is in its lack of gratuitous violence, gore and nudity. Consequently, Deadly Lessons isn't so tacky or cheap and is essentially a whodunnit- Hardy Drew style. The focus is on the detecting than on murders. There's no heavy menace, but it's got a light touch while maintaining a serious tone. Donna Reed adds a touch of class. Larry Wilcox' detective character looks out of his depth and is an annoying character. It might lack some punch, but overall it's an entertaining mystery. Plus the ending is quite suspenseful with that twist. Diane Franklin is cute.

When girls at Starkwater Hall Boarding School start turning up dead, a group of friends are determined to find out who's doing it. But will they before it's too late? It's a pretty good movie but slasher fans will be disappointed from the lack of blood. There's none, but there is an okay suspense scene at the end.

It's great to see at least a few posts on this good little t.v. slasher. I still pull out my old VHS of the NBC premiere just to see what television was like especially considering the current, sad state of the tube now where commercial blurbs are at the bottom, top and sides of squashed, mashed and castrated film & program credits and huge bylines slapped across the screen to remind you of what you are watching! Well, I can't really add to what's been said about this film except that it got some great play time on TBS in the late '80s and in an interview shortly before she died, Donna Reed lambasted the film as 'very cheap and on the sleazy side'! Nothing of the sort, I actually double featured this with Wes Craven's Scream for a couple of friends of mine and they really got into it. When will tele-flicks like this get their due?

In the early 1980s, making a teen slasher movie solely intended for distribution via cable television was either a very courageous undertaking or a very ignorant one. If you ask me, it was a very ignorant one because 80s slashers could only distinguish themselves from the massive competition in two areas, namely the depiction of nasty gore (various & ingenious methods for killing dumb teenagers) and explicit sleaze (beauties showering or having premarital sex moments before getting killed). Being a TV-movie, "Deadly Lessons" couldn't feature any of these two sub-genre trademarks and the consequences are irreversible now. Today, practically all contemporary slasher movies have received fancy DVD-releases and often enjoy massive cult reputations even though many of them downright suck, whereas "Deadly Lessons" is entirely forgotten and obscure. Numerous TV thrillers and horror movies from the 70s decade are still around and popular, however, but that's because they often benefited from an exceptionally great screenplay or a uniquely suspenseful atmosphere. Apart from being blood-free and sleaze-free, "Deadly Lessons" also has the bad luck of being very mundane, dullish and unremarkable from all possible viewpoints. The setting, pacing, story and denouement are standard slasher material. It's not worse, but certainly not any better than the rest of the 80s slashers, but at least all the others showcased gruesome murders and gratuitous nudity. In an exclusive all-girls boarding school, one of the students is found drowned in a lake. It looks like an unfortunate accident, but police detective Kemper immediately suspects that she was murdered. He's quickly proven right, as more girls are turning up dead while fear and hysteria are taking over the daily life at school. Prime suspects include the handsome but bizarre stable boy, the obligatory old & creepy janitor, the eccentric French teacher and maybe even the sophisticated but uptight school principal Mrs. Wade. The climax is implausible and far-fetched, but I'm not deducting any points for that since it was also a typical slasher trademark in the eighties. If you have too much free time on your hands, "Deadly Lessons" might still be worth seeking out in case you like horror curiosities, or to see a few stars in their earliest roles, like Bill Paxton, Ally Sheedy and Nancy Cartwright (yes, she who does Bart Simpson's voice)

Pretty boring TV movie that plays around with some slasher tropes, but feels more like a padded episode of Murder, She Wrote. There's never a great sense of danger, but I do like the cast a lot with familiar faces like Diane Franklin, Ally Sheedy, Donna Reed, and Bill Paxton showing up and adding some class to everything. I only wish it were a more exciting movie.