Girls School Screamers

Beautiful girls alone in a haunted mansion try raising the spirit of a girl who lived there 40 years ago. Good story filled with average actors. Definitely worth a look.

Of course I knew to keep expectations extremely low for "Girl School Murders". Obviously I spotted the bad rating and harshly negative reviews here on IMDb, and I'm naturally also well aware of Troma's questionable reputation as a production/distributor company. And yet, in spit of all this, the incurable horror geek in me still found the rather pricy purchase was justified even if only to own that utterly cool DVD-cover in my collection! You know, the one with the girl's rotten face that has worms crawling out of it. I just wish the film itself was half as awesome as the poster image! But, on the contrary, "Girl School Screamers" is easily one of the weakest and most forgettable slasher efforts of the entire eighties. It certainly has potential, though. The opening sequences, features a young boy trespassing into an old dark house and running into an eerie ghost on the staircase, is surprisingly grim and atmospheric but, unfortunately, it's the only real highlight. The spooky house is donated, via a last will and testament, to a Catholic college for girls, and seven fresh-faced students are promptly recruited to go and clean it over the weekend. It turns out that a beautiful young girl tragically died in the house nearly forty years ago and, moreover, she looks exactly like one of the students. They subsequently get killed off one by one, but this is where the film truly fails to live up to its potential, as the murders are mundane, uninspired, bloodless and often even occurring off-screen. The acting performances are lamentable, and so is everything else; - period. But hey, the DVD has a prominent spot on the eighties-shelf of my collection!

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.

‘How much gut wrenching fright can you stand?' Read the somewhat intriguing tagline that stared back at me from the cover of Troma's Girls School Screamers. Now that, I thought to myself, really depends on whether you mean ‘fright' as the film's scary or ‘fright' as in I will truly be frightened when I see how bad the general production of this extremely cheap looking horror flick really is! But I guess I was jumping the gun a little so I waited for the screen to light up in a completely un-biased state of mind…

After an unexplained opening tagline of ‘in the darkness there is evil within the evil there is death' we are shown a group of young boys daring each other to enter a rather creepy looking mansion. Finally the ‘who dares wins' type kid of the bunch accepts the challenge by announcing, `I'll do it, I'll go in there.' (Have you guessed what's going to happen yet?) So the group of pre-teens watch as he slowly ascends the drive, disappearing into the foggy night sky. As he enters the house a spooky voice can be heard chanting ‘Tyler'. (And if I were this particular child I'd be hot on my feet before I even entered!) The hapless kid chooses to ignore this warning and continues up the staircase. Suddenly a ghost-like female figure, dressed from head to toe in a wedding dress descends the steps as if to greet him. The poor boy is now frozen stiff and the ghoul removes her vale to reveal a rotten and decomposed face, blessed with maggots, worms and a decaying smile! She starts spookily moaning, `Kiss me Tyler' and finally the somewhat backward thinking junior comes back to his senses and hotfoots it out of the house. He manages to make it back to where his friends are situated, before collapsing to a heap on the floor in front of them and mumbling gibberish. After the credits have rolled we are shown the boy looking worse for wear in hospital, and towards the end of the film we are again treated to visuals of him (Well what do ya know?) looking ill in the aforementioned infirmary. However, we never get to find out what happened to him and his misfortune is never justified in any way. Thinks that's strange…well it's only the beginning trust me! We are now introduced to seven fresh faced sorority sisters: Jackie (Molly O'Mara), Elizabeth (Sharon Christopher), Rosemary (Monica Antunucci) Karen (Beth O'Malley), Katie (Marie Butler) Adele (Marcia Hinton) and Susan (Karen Krevetz). They have just found out that they're going to be spending four whole days cleaning up, guess where…that's right you got it in one, the haunted mansion from earlier! And they all merrily go home to pack and prepare for their stay, completely unaware of the troubles that lay ahead! Sister Urban (Vera Gallagher) who is best described as a bubbly yet elderly version of Mary Poppins also joins the group on their trip. After they arrive, as sure as night becomes day, an unseen someone begins dispatching off the happy-go-lucky co-eds in a variety of gruesome ways and Jackie begins to realise that her coming to the house was definitely not a coincidence…

Mixing the supernatural and the slasher is a job that isn't easy to do. Many have tried and almost as many have failed knowingly. So that's why I was pessimistic about watching Girls School Screamers and knew what I was in for…

Now some films are cheap, but they still attempt to make a decent effort, and on occasion it pays off. Others know they're cheap and are content with staying cheap. GSS is one of the later, a fact that is emphasised at the start of the credits where the words ‘introducing' are placed before the entire cast, as if to say not one of these actors/actresses has done anything else before this at all. As far as I know, none of them went on to do anything either, except maybe for one or two walk on roles. But it's hardly surprising as they're all mostly no-hopers! Molly O' Mara was about the best of the bunch, if only because she was vaguely reminiscent of Kathryn McNeil from House on Sorority row. It would have been nice to maybe see her in a more upbeat production supporting a decent cast. But you can just picture her resume it can't have helped her out too much; just think about it:

In 1984 I starred in a third rate horror movie called Girls School Screamers, The director expected it to be the next ‘The Exorcist' but it fell slightly short of his marker, I guess he over anticipated it slightly. It sold about as well as a pair of wet Bermuda trunks in Iceland!

Get what I mean!

Although this can squeeze neatly into the slasher category, it doesn't follow the traditional formula of masked killer stalks teens. An invisible ‘force' generally commits most of the murders, although meat cleavers and electrocutions keep this from completely abandoning the standard blueprint. At times, Girls School can feel pretty eerie thanks to a haunting score and some decent lighting. But most of the times when things start to look impressive, something is guaranteed to pop up and lower your expectations. Kudos to the director however, for at least trying a bit of everything, from Ouija boards and possession to the far more typical serial killer clichés.

It‘s kind of gory in a very lowbrow sort of way and there are a couple of imaginative murders. Also it manages to refrain from becoming too tedious, which is always a bonus. But to be honest, a film where even the story line isn't justified properly can't be expected to reap any rewards, especially in an era of such steep competition. There are too many unforgivable flaws that make GSS only worthy of a bin bag. I mean, what the hell happened to that little boy? Did he survive the coma? And if the ghost of the woman in a wedding dress is shown to be a goodie, why do that to the little brat in the first place? All these queries needed to be answered and the fact that the director didn't even acknowledge them just makes this mess look even worse. There is some fun to be had, if you enjoy laughing at the cheesy antics of the teens and the unconvincing death sequences, but none worth wasting £12.99 on! If supernatural slashers are your particular poisons, then stick with the proven redeemers like The Bogeyman or Goodnight, God bless and avoid this uninspired offering

Is there any other film company that has released quite as many stinkers as Troma? Girls School Screamers is yet another woeful offering sent to test the mettle of hardened movie masochists, the movie delivering very little worthy of mention.

The uninspired plot sees seven Catholic School girls sent to a creepy mansion where they are to catalogue the art collection of the late Tyler Welles. Whilst there, the girls hold a seance to contact the spirit of Tyler's niece Jennifer, who died in mysterious circumstances. A not particularly interesting mystery unravels and one-by-one the girls are bumped off by an unseen killer.

Diabolical acting, pedestrian directing, virtually no gore and zero nudity from the girls (T&A is usually a given for a Troma movie) all go to make this an absolute clunker. Oh, and only one of the girls actually screams, to the best of my recollection.