Werewolf In A Girls' Dormitory (1961) I had high hopes that
this movie would be deliriously bad. After all, you've got the way cool title
and a theme song called "Ghoul in School" or something that rhymed along those
lines. I had this vision in my head that we'd be treated to giggling
schoolgirls, greasers, hoods, T-Birds, poodle skirts, and switchblades. I
thought a lot of these chicks would scream and that that hunky new biology
teacher that all the coeds made eyes at while they popped their bubble gum
would turn out be that hunky werewolf that's been ripping the clothes off these
nubile students. It turned out that I was thinking way too much, because what
I got was a snoozer of an Italian movie whose dullards could have fit right
into such tepid fare as Track Of The Vampire and Nightmare Castle (coincidentally also available in the Killer Creature Double Feature line of
movies inflicted on a budget-minded, but stupid public).
Oh, I got part of it right - the part of the hunky new teacher showing up and
behaving suspiciously like a teenage eating werewolf, but that was about it.
See, the title is a bit deceptive. This isn't really a girl's dormitory that
we're peeping in on. It's really an Italian reformatory for wayward girls who
have had brushes with the law, like Priscilla who killed a sailor that was
trying to drop anchor on her roommate. I know some of you out there are
already combing your memory for the salacious images that you've secreted away
from such classics as Reform School Girls and to a lesser extent, Bad Girls Dormitory. Well, zip up you losers, because this is horror movie that concentrates on
things that could have been prurient, but weren't. There's a blackmail plot. There's a dude chained up by his woman in the secret
lab/dungeon down in the basement of the dorm. There's even a girl smothered in
her bed! Well, almost smothered, I think all the other girls that were
sleeping in the room woke up and scared away the assailant. In spite of all of
this, the movie remains annoyingly tame and underplayed, to the point that my
attention started to wander and I began reading the back of the DVD case to see
if the other movie on this double feature disc looked any better (Blood Creature - another Dr. Moreau riff - ack!).  Once the "Ghoul in School" theme song finished (it was awful, but ended much
too soon for my tastes - it was up there with the theme song from Hammer's The Lost Continent) the movie's promise of delightfully heavy cheese evaporated and it settled
into to one of those bland black and white forays into weak monster make-up,
bad dubbing, and lots of scenes where people didn't do much but blather
incessantly.
Dr. Julian Olcott (portrayed by the brother of Maximilian Schell - maybe I
should have the brother of MonsterHunter watch these movies starring relatives
of the rich and famous) arrives at the school as a new science teacher. He's
the blonde hunky type of doctor that usually comes to a girls' school to escape
his past. In this case, his past involves beating a murder rap back in the
city. Besides the shady Dr. Olcott, there's also about two students the movie
focuses on. One of them is named Mary and she has this gig going on where
she's having an affair with one of the other, Mr. Alfred Whiteman, and also is
blackmailing him over some letters he wrote her. I'm not really sure how that
works. Don't you have the affair so that you can then blackmail him? The best
part of all this is that Whiteman has to pay this tramp money every time they
meet for a "date" in the forest. So you're getting blackmailed by a hooker
that you continue to patronize? Alfred and Mary arrange for a tryst in the forest at night, but there's a
problem. These Italian forests are full of wolves that howl constantly and
this particular forest also houses a werewolf! Mary gets eaten by this monster
while Alfred's not around. There also happens to be a witness to this and that
would be none other than Alfred's wife Sheena. Sheena? Is that Italian?
You're probably thinking, how could you cheat on your wife when she's named
after a jungle babe? If you got a gander at what this Italian Sheena looks
like you'd understand. She's more Cheetah than Jane.  The next morning, the death of the school slut is the talk of homeroom. What
was really classic about it was that right around the time when the cops were
sniffing around looking for the werewolf that killed her, just about the time
of Mary's funeral, Alfred is giving the eye to Mary's friend, Priscilla. He's
looking at her and kind of saying "hey you look like you could be as trampy as
your dead friend. How bout if I start paying you money, writing you letters,
and getting blackmailed by you, say tonight, out back in the old forest?"
Alfred also has a toady that follows around after him doing what Alfred needs
done. This handicapped villain (every bad horror flick has'em) is the
caretaker (of course he is) and is named Walter. Wally spends most of the film
trying his darnedest to scowl, shuffle around, and let his arm hang limp at his
side, all the while vainly attempting to elicit that whole Peter Lorre vibe.
He merely elicits a collective sigh from the audience as they realize what he
is trying to do and how poorly it comes off. Walter is basically Alfred's
pimp, setting up the transactions with the girls who are probably C and D
students. Alfred, when not sending out the school maintenance staff to help him
get hooked up, is also using Walter to try and recover all those sappy letters
he wrote the late and unlamented tart, Mary. Priscilla is also after the letters and eventually gets her hands on them. She
believes that Alfred killed her friend, so she does what any good little girl
would do to uncover the truth. She goes undercover as a hooker. Yep, taking a
page from Didi McCall's book who used this little ruse on Hunter during each and every sweeps week, she gets a rendezvous with Alfred set up
through Walter. The only problem is that instead of meeting up with Alfred at
his place, she hooks up with big, bad Sheena!  Sheena isn't too fond of her husband and she doesn't think that all those
slutty schoolgirls are the cat's meow, but she knows that her husband is not
the killer! How does she know that? Well, she followed him out that night to
see what tramp he was knocking uglies with and she saw who really killed Mary.
Later, we see a mysterious figure drug and kill Sheena before she can decide if
she wants to spill the beans about any of this or whether she's just going to
continue to harangue her husband for being a bit on the adulterous side.
The werewolf then tries to kill Priscilla. She survives, but a real wolf shows
up and bites the werewolf on the hand. This is a vital clue, because now any
guy with a wound on his hand is public enemy number one. Not content to
distract us with their banal blackmail subplot, the movie makers also decide to
have every guy have some type of hand problem. Walter has a problem with his,
but he's been that way since birth. Dr. Olcott has an owie on his hand and we
learn eventually the headmaster, Mr. Swift, does, too.
A mostly uneventful movie that pads its running time with lots of boring ga ga
about those stupid letters and the blackmail. You see the werewolf for a few
seconds like twice or something and when you do see him, his make up looks like
the kind I would wear in grade school for Halloween. I suppose they do a fair
job of playing whodunit for awhile here, but things turn out to be silly enough
(how did the werewolf get turned into a werewolf in the first place? How did a
secret lab and dungeon get installed in the school?) that it really doesn't
matter in the end. A little more excitement to take your mind off these
problems was needed. You also probably could have done a little better than the bland Dr. Olcott
(just because you are blonde and a doctor does not make you interesting -
marriage material yes, interesting no). Priscilla's only memorable because she
was married to Roman Polanski in real life for a while. Completely workmanlike
werewolf effort will leave you wishing to see Paul Naschy mugging for the
camera and rolling around on the floor with some other lame monster. And to
think that it was all set in a bad girls' reformatory - how could it have all
gone so wrong?
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