Satan's School for Girls

Satan’s School for Girls

1973

Director- David Lowell Rich

Cast-  Pamela Franklin, Kate Jackson, Lloyd Bochner, Jamie Smith Jackson, Roy Thinnes, Jo Van Fleet, Cheryl Ladd, Terry Lumley

With a title like that you’re probably expecting saucy girls in plaid skirts and knee socks getting spankings in the middle of a pentagram. While I would like to see that, it’s about as far from this movie as possible, which is a pretty serious suspense story.

It begins with the panicked flight and mysterious death of Martha Sayers after she returns home from the Salem Academy, no not Professor X’s school for mutants. This is an all girl’s college. Her death is ruled a suicide, but her sister Elizabeth isn’t so sure.

Elizabeth (Pamela Franklin who had appeared opposite Orson Wells in Necromancy the previous year) decides to enroll in the school under a false name. She is greeted by the girls including Roberta (Kate Jackson a few years before she would become my favorite of Charlie’s various Angels) Debbie, a nervous girl who seems on the verge of cracking and Jody (a young Cheryl Ladd, giving us two of Charlie’s Angels for the price of one movie).

She discovers that the girls from the school have a bad habit of committing suicide. The prime suspect seems to be the psychology teacher, Professor Delacroix, (veteran character actor Lloyd Bochner) a behaviorist who would put B.F. Skinner to shame and who seems intent on pushing little Debbie to her breaking point. With Roberta’s help, Elizabeth begins to unravel the mystery of the school which turns out to be an occult conspiracy with Old Nick himself at the center of it.

Satan’s School for Girls originally aired as an ABC made for TV movie. In the modern

era of cable and streaming, it’s not difficult to find good movies being made for TV, but that was not always the case. Made for TV movies had a way of being either specifically topical (her daughter died from drugs!) or unoriginal. However, a few genre gems were made this way (think Dark Night of the Scarecrow or Salem’s Lot).

Now this is no Salem’s Lot. After all, there are only so many Tobe Hoopers in the world. While the movie lacks that level of sophistication, it doesn’t suffer from lack of guts. It takes it self very seriously, never accepting a lack of production values as an excuse to be lazy. Can you imagine the family friendly, politically correct ABC of today marketing a movie with a name like that? If the movie suffers from anything it’s the short running time. There isn’t really enough exploration of the story’s occult themes.

The movie was remade as a TV movie in 2000 with Shannen Doherty in the lead role.