Satan’s School for Girls (1973)

When her sister commits suicide under – as the audience witnesses in the prologue – very mysterious circumstances while on premises belonging to the private school for girls she goes to, Elizabeth Sayers (Pamela Franklin), travels to the school in Salem herself, enrolling under an assumed name for some undercover investigation. Liz’s new classmates seem friendly enough, if sometimes a bit high-strung, but that’s probably just college life.

Further investigation does suggest something sinister going on there, though. There are strange noises in the night, a secret room in the cellar, and the rate of death through misadventure or suicide among the girls becomes rather high for a place quite this small. Is the headmistress (Jo Van Fleet) – generally called “the Dragon” – somehow involved? And what about the clearly deranged psychology teacher (Lloyd Bochner) and his obsession with rats in mazes? Is perhaps the not at all suspiciously hip and (supposedly) hunky Mr Clampett (Roy Thinnes) quite a bit more sinister than he pretends to be? And where was Satan when the girls died?

Well, if you haven’t figured the answers to these questions out in about a third of the time Elizabeth does, I really don’t know what to say. Of course, the obviousness of its plot doesn’t actually detract from the virtues of David Lowell Rich’s Aaron Spelling-produced bit of 70s TV horror. And really, can we blame a sensible young woman for not figuring out one of her teachers is actually Satan trying to recruit a coven of eight late teenage witches by charming and cajoling them into collective suicide?

So, yes, the plot is really rather on the silly side but it’s the good kind of silly that sees a witch and/or Satan under every rock, distrusts all authority (because Satan is the ultimate seducer of headmistresses, it turns out), and would really have a cover of a girl in a white nightgown running away from an old mansion if it only could get away with it, and were a novel. Thusly, even if you’re like me and find Thinnes’s supposed charm here rather smarmy and obvious, and peg him as a clear creep, the film’s charm is always obvious as well. All of this places the film somewhere in the realm of the gothic romance revival and the least extreme stories in contemporary, code approved, horror comics. I’d probably live there if I could.

Of course, if you’re of a mind to, you can interpret certain elements of the film as a commentary on actual 70s cults but the film’s just too old-fashioned and cheesy to really be read that way unless one is an academic looking for something to over-interpret.

Rich turns out to be one among the extremely competent TV horror directors here, showing a certain flair for the use of limited light sources – resulting in some lovely atmospheric scenes of Elizabeth sneaking through the house at night – and adding a couple of scenes that hint at a darker underside to supernatural things than most of what we actually see. There’s the honestly creepy scene where Satan breaks the already pretty cracked headmistress completely, and about as menacing a murder scene as you can get when you can’t show blood involving a man, a body of water, and some wooden poles brandished by rather merciless teens. And, eventually, there are also the sweet, sweet tones of horrible betrayal. Even the ending’s pretty nasty for a TV movie.


All of which does certainly put Satan’s School for Girls into the highest tier of 70s US TV horror, as I’m sure our old buddy Satan will agree.

Some thoughts about Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957)

It’s among the mild ironies of film history that this film, a movie I don’t hesitate to call a masterpiece, is actually the lesser of director John Sturges’s Westerns about the (wait for it) gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Fortunately, despite being about the same historical moment, and concerning the same people, both films are also so different their existence as separate entities actually makes sense, particularly since the two films have quite different views of these people and these events. The later Hour of the Gun is most probably the slightly more historically accurate one (at the very least with a more realistically morally grey Wyatt Earp, where Lancaster’s Wyatt really does seem to go for the halo, though without ever being able to reconcile it with being a human being like we all are), though both films really aren’t about attempts to recreate history.

I don’t think it is necessary for me to go over Sturges’s virtues as a Western director, nor the particularly inspired quality of his efforts here, for that would be stating the very, very obvious. Instead, let me spend this sentence salivating about Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster (two of the very finest of their generation in Hollywood) doing what they do best, the fine rest of the ensemble, the often awe-inspiring photography, as well as Sturges’s artful sense of staging.

Beside being a film about a certain legendary shoot-out, Gunfight to me really seems to be a film about poisonous relationships, the way people tend to wallow in them, and the generally horrible consequences that come with them. Why, if you look at what’s happening in the film from a certain angle, you might even begin to think somebody involved in the film might have been of the opinion all human relationships in the end become poisonous and destructive, family ties strangling people in the end, and friendships not leaving people happier or less lonely and self-destructive (or would anyone want to argue that Holliday and Earp are good for each other any more than Holliday and Kate are?), at best giving them one thing more to die for.

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