Director: Paolo Heusch
Writer: Ernesto Gastaldi
From: Chilling (the last one!)
Watch: archive.org
Girls at a reform school are being brutally murdered. Could it be the philandering professor, the creeping caretaker, or the new doctor with a disturbing past?
WARNING: The title and blurb are more exciting than anything in this dull-as-dirt movie, a movie I’ve watched far too many times for how much I don’t enjoy it. I’ll get to my history with this flick in a moment, first, the plot.
The setting is a girls’ dormitory/reform school. Julian, a new professor has just arrived and is told the girls there (all played by women so check off “elderly teens” on your bad movie trope list) would otherwise be in a reform school, but are being given a second chance. Julian, likewise is getting a second chance. He and the headmaster have a mutual friend so he’s being hired despite having previously been a doctor and stripped of his license for “reasons better left unsaid.”
The reasons, by the way, are that he was fired from his previous job for killing a patient he’d taken as a lover. White guys: can’t be wrong, only fail up. (mark that trope too).
That night, Mary, a student at the school runs off to meet up with a philandering professor. (mark “pedophile”) She wants him to get her out of the school or she’ll reveal their relationship. He wants the letters he’s sent her. One her way back to the dorm, she’s killed by a werewolf.
Priscilla, Mary’s friend, starts investigating the death. Priscilla is in the school for attempted murder because she nearly killed a sailor that was attacking Mary when they lived together. It’s not clear from how it’s told if the sailor was Mary’s lover or a John or if the movie wants us to see Priscilla as a victim of circumstance or as someone who’s not as noble as she acts. I’d chalk that up to the translation (oh yeah, mark “dubbing”). Anyway, Priscilla starts uncovering all the details: Mary’s liason’s, Julian’s past, and even encounters the werewolf. She’s threatened by the philanderer’s wife, but then the wife is murdered.
Yada yada, the woman who died under Julian’s care was a werewolf and she died as he was perfecting her treatment. The philanderer orders the caretaker to find Mary’s letters, but the caretaker is caught in the dorm, flees, and falls from a tower to his death. The headmaster finds the letters on the body, confronts the philanderer, and hands the letters over. Julian and Priscilla visit the philanderer that night as he’s packing to flee the area, confront him with what they know, and he commits suicide.
Meanwhile, we see the headmistress doing experiments on a wolf. The werewolf comes in, she injects him, and he turns into the headmaster. Before she can deliver the second injection and cure him, the wolf she was working on attacks and kills her. The next night, the headmaster turns into a werewolf, tries to attack Priscilla, but Julian shoots him. They get the full story from the headmaster before he dies and Julian and Priscilla leave together. THE END
As I said, I’ve watched this movie a lot, and never on any horror host show. It’s just too boring. The most compelling part is the incongruous opening song, “The Ghoul in School,” which is missing from my print. I think that may be due to some copyright trick/workaround, but the song is a hoot and you should check it out.
I first saw this movie almost twenty years ago on a different cheapo movie box set with some roommates who went on to tell me to kill my dog. They sucked, but it turns out I’m not the guy you cross. We were all riffing it and having a good time when, about twenty minutes before the end, we all passed out. We weren’t drinking, weren’t using any substances, weren’t even flagging in the run-up to passing out, we just all went like someone had thrown a switch. I watched it a few times since then just to see the end and in previous attempts to go through these sets. Most recently, I sat down to write a riff script for the movie as part of a horror host show I was putting together with a friend. I tell ya, if the movie is boring to watch straight through, it’s excruciating to watch in 15-second chunks, constantly pausing to write gags and annotations.
To put it another way, the movie is highly riffable and I recommend it in that context. On its own, it’s really dull and I’m not 100% sure why. Part of the problem is it commits to the white guy as the hero (mark your list). Priscilla is the hero for the first third to half of the movie and then the attention and narrative agency switches to Julian. He’s not the hero, he’s one of the red herrings. When we move away from Priscilla, who’s pretty awesome as a hero, we lose a lot of the investment in solving the mystery. Yes, she wants to reveal the werewolf to protect herself, but she’s also trying to avenge her friend and root out the corruption at the core of this school. When you shift the burden of the investigation to Julian, you lose the personal investment in previous victims as well as the impetus to clean up the organization. In fact, he’s part of the corruption (although he’s actually been hired to share his research on a cure for lycanthropy, but, again, that becomes a new motivation arriving pretty late in the film).
Also, the movie’s called Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory. As Nelson says of Naked Lunch, “I can think of at least two things wrong with that title.” I know I bag on a lot of these movies for gratuitous nudity so I sound like a hypocrite when I ding a flick for not being more salacious, and I’ll try to avoid that here. My complaint is that there’s a level of gleeful absurdity promised by the title that isn’t followed through. Also, the werewolf is never in the dormitory. The werewolf isn’t in the movie much at all. A werewolf movie needs more werewolf attacks, especially if it has one within the first five minutes.
I will say I enjoyed the movie more this time compared to the other times I’d watched it. That may be due to context—I’m grateful that it’s not another Marimark production—or may be due to familiarity—I could watch it with nostalgia. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still boring, but I wouldn’t tell you to stay way. I would say make sure you’re ready to rip into it and have friends with you to keep you awake.
This movie is in the public domain and available from archive.org here.
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