mark.waltz Poor Terry Lumley. Driving around in a frantic state, trying to reach her sister by phone, and feeling like she's being stalked like some rat caught in a trap with a cat lurking nearby. Approached by some unseen creature of darkness, she begins to scream, and all of a sudden, she turns into what looks like a Dali painting, her thin face becoming as equally horrific as the fate she is about to meet. This sets up the rest of this somewhat silly 1970's T.V. movie which has a cult following and includes such familiar faces as Pamela Franklin (as the poor victim's sister), Kate Jackson (as a student who becomes Franklin's pal when she enrolls to try and find out what happened to her sister), Roy Thinnes (as a new wave thinker and art professor), Lloyd Bochner (as another eccentric professor), and in a rather campy part, Oscar Winner Joy Van Fleet as the headmistress nicknamed "The Dragon Lady". Van Fleet isn't exactly a dragon lady; In fact, she seems an unwilling participant in the mayhem and macabre goings on, and having given a few camp performances, she is far from as melodramatic as some of those past performances. Certainly, something terrible is going on in the school as half a dozen girls are found dead in the sinister looking basement, and nobody can figure out why, whether it was suicide or murder, and if murder, what kind of motive lead to it. To be honest, I frankly found it dull, and having seen it years ago at a more impressionable age, it doesn't hold up all that well. Many T.V. movies did better jobs with equally horrific tales, most memorably "The Devil's Daughter" and "The Initiation of Sarah", but frankly, they are all rip-offs of "Rosemary's Baby".

babeth_jr I was 12 years old when this made for TV movie came out in 1973 and I remember watching it with my twin sister. We both loved watching all the t.v. movies of the week, especially the scary ones.This one stars Pamela Franklin as Elizabeth Sayers, a young woman whose sister Martha allegedly commits suicide. Elizabeth doesn't believe that her sister would kill herself, so she goes to the Salem School where Martha was attending to try to uncover what really happened to her sister.The movie has some truly creepy moments, such as when Elizabeth is roaming around the dark school grounds with a lantern during a storm. There is an underlying sense of doom throughout the movie.Kate Jackson and Cheryl Ladd, both future stars of Charlie's Angels, are in supporting roles as student's of the school, as is Jamie Smith-Jackson, who was in several good made for t.v. movies in the 1970's, for example, Go Ask Alice. Whatever became of her? JoAnn Fleet plays the headmistress of the school and Roy Thiennes is a creepy professor. Without giving too much away, Elizabeth discovers that there is a satanic cult at the school, hence the title of the film.Of course the movie has it's cheesy moments, but hey, this was a made for t.v. movie after all. I think it is one of the better ones, and the ending was a surprise to me. If you love 1970's made for t.v. movies I highly recommend this one. It's much better than the remake starring Shannon Daugherty.

Estelle Edwards Another of those flicks inspired by the success of 'Rosemary's Baby'. When that movie came out, the nation developed an obsession or preoccupation with the devil or the whole concept of evil in general. I even remember seeing a '60 Minutes' segment at that tender age which reported that while many people were less religious or didn't believe in God, many others believed in the Devil. At least, that was the synopsis given by Mike Wallace's opening segment voice-over.'Satan's School For Girls' is one of those ABC titles that can be easily found today compared to, say, 'The Screaming Woman'. Sometimes you pick up a bit of trivia by watching these old television movies. When I watched it a few years ago, I didn't realize that Kate Jackson and Cheryl Ladd, who was using her old surname of Stoppelmoor, had acted together before 'Charlie's Angels'. Kate Jackson is superb in her role as the level-headed, innocent Roberta, who appears to be the only person Elizabeth can trust. I have a problem with the ending, though, which gives the viewer the impression that Roy Thinnes, as the cult leader, not only has special powers but isn't of this world at all. But hey, it's a movie about the devil, black magic, satanism and the disturbing reality that good doesn't always win - at least, not totally. That was another thing which became common in entertainment: allowing evil to win. I guess this was a product of the nation's loss of innocence and disillusionment with events like the Kennedy and King assassinations, Vietnam, and the Watergate scandal. We all sort of 'grew up fast' after those events.

Michael DeZubiria 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.