Pamela Franklin and Kate Jackson are students at a dubious all-girls school
A young woman (Pamela Franklin) enrolls in an all-girls academy in Salem, Massachusetts, to find out what provoked her sister’s death. Things get creepier and creepier. Jamie Smith-Jackson, Kate Jackson and Cheryl Ladd play students while Jo Van Fleet is on hand as the headmistress and Roy Thinnes an art professor.
"Satan's School for Girls" (1973) is a TV horror flick that inspired “Suspiria” (1977) and the 2000 remake (or reimagining) of the same title. Pamela Franklin is fine as the protagonist, but she never did much for me personally; the same with Jackson.
Meanwhile the fashions of the early 70s are pretty horrendous, yet the underwhelming story does slowly build and has some effectively creepy sequences with people lurking through dark abodes with lanterns during a storm.
The Spanish-style Academy is the only real issue, which really takes the viewer out of the story because it's impossible to view the structure as something built in New England in the 1600s, let alone at the time of the story. Of course the filmmakers were forced to use what was available in SoCal since this was a limited-budget production.
In the 2000 remake the filmmakers used a more accurate-looking school, shot at John Abbott College, near Montréal, Québec. Kate reappears in that one as the dean. Check it out.
Kate Jackson and Cheryl Ladd would of course team-up in a few years for Charlie's Angels (1976).
The movie runs about 1 hour, 14 minutes, and was shot in SoCal as follows: 20th Century Fox Studios, Century City; King Gillette Ranch, Malibu Creek State Park, Calabasas; and Mulholland Highway, Cornell (the opening sequence with Martha at the phone booth).
GRADE B-/C+
