Satan's School for Girls

SATAN'S SCHOOL
FOR GIRLS

DEVIL LOONIVERSITY

by pat

Bad movie night has come again. Item one on the agenda was a little gem which had not been subjected to years of constant pressure and is therefore still worthless coal. From a $15 10-pack of DVDs, our first warning sign, comes a TV movie produced by Aaron Spelling entitled "Satan's School For Girls." It features two future Angels of Charlie, Kate Jackson and Cheryl Ladd, and a host of other Spelling regulars from such shows as "Dynasty" and "Hotel." Even scarier, I just found out the film was remade two years ago with Shannon Doherty, another Spelling Alumnus (Alumnae? Alumneu?), and brought back Jackson who apparently found more embarrassing things to have on your resume than this. Should we want her, I am guessing we'll be able to sign her for something we'll be filming within the year, so low she has tumbled. I said low, not far.

The movie begins with a girl driving franticly down the road. She stops to make a phone call, but freaks out at an old guy before he can warn her that she's doomed, DOOMED!!! As she barrels away, the old guy takes her smoke, which is probably all he wanted anyway. Back in the 70's people were allowed to smoke on TV, even good guys. The old guy unfortunately didn't get to see the pack of cigarettes, where the Surgeon General warned him that if he kept smoking, he'd be doomed, DOOMED!!! Poor guy. Really, he looked pretty poor, begging for smokes and all.

Back to the scared girl. She finally gets to where she was apparently going, hops out of the car, and runs to a nice lakeside house belonging to her sister. I think she may have left the car running, or the sound was just that bad. It did seem odd that the car could be heard in the distance for the whole rest of the film. She gets to the door, where and old guy (who she is frightened by) gives her keys to get in the house. She locks herself in (never give a crazy girl the only set of keys), stares blankly at a few things, then starts screaming again. She made more random, obnoxious noise than the Ultima parked outside my old Bronx apartment. They find her, either having been hung or having learned to levitate. Either way, her sister enters the room and screams. Must be genetic.

Her sister has a strong resemblance to any given child in any given Japanese giant monster movie. You know, the ones that always run into the room yelling "Uncle! Some big exciting thing is happening! Monster has risen fun haha!" She decides to do a covert investigation to find out what happened by enrolling at the Salem Academy for Women, where everybody graduates to soap operas. Yes, I made a "Days of Our Lives" reference. That doesn't mean anything. She walks in, enrolls, gets a tour, and has her own room by the end of the night. I know community colleges with more strict admissions policies, and one of them teaches a class about this website. The sister, Liz, now that I've bothered to look it up, starts to notice some odd behavior amongst everyone there. What takes her a day or so to notice, especially when she's going there to look for clues like the ones she's finding, the audience picks up on pretty much as a character is introduced. Hmmm, he guy watching her carefully and throwing her all of the leading question might, just maybe, be on to her. SHOCK!

The next hour or five, it's so hard to tell, is the investigation. Liz wanders around the school grounds carrying an oil lamp with an electric bulb, because witches are kooky like that with their appliances. The extra odd ting about the lamp is that she was in a moderately lit room, fired up the wick, and the whole room went dark save for the spot immediately around her. The lamp itself didn't provide the majority of the light, but had a supernatural control over small theatrical stage lights scattered around the campus. Quite impressive, really. So she wanders around for a while, finds some clues, then runs into one of her teachers, races back though everywhere she's been, wakes up Kate Jackson, then takes her on a point for point tour of every place we've just been twice. Most of the running time is people walking from one place to another. While "24," "High Noon," and possibly "The World According to Garp" all make use of real time by showing every moment and every little insignificant thing to get us from one place to another, usually other things are going on as that happens. In this case it is just walking. Lots and lots of walking. All of the walking was responsible for Kate Jackson losing the absolutely no body fat she needed to shed to be one of Charlie's Angels, and when she gained an unsightly pound and a half during the second season of "Scarecrow & Mrs. King," she actually suggested an all-walking two-part mystery.

We watch the plot twist and turn, usually around small trees or hedges, until we build towards the startling climax. Actually, somewhere in the middle some teacher who I think was the white neighbor on the Jeffersons, but us white people all look alike so who can be sure, gets killed by some girls in a game that's a mix between Marco Polo and beating a piñata. Then we "discover" that the art teacher, who really comes off as more of an English professor, is Satan, making him ultimately most like a vice-principal. He and his girls have known the whole time that Liz was the sister of the girl from the beginning. This made me feel good, because if Satan wasn't able to do a simple background check then I'd worry somehow Joey Stalin is up in Heaven with a big fake moustache on top of his normal moustache. It makes sense. Somebody says, "Hey, what's Stalin doing up here? He's responsible for the deaths of millions!" Then somebody else says, "No, Stalin had a real moustache. That one is clearly fake, therefore that cannot be Stalin. Stalin in Heaven? Ha, surely, fellow angel, you should get back into the line where God is giving out brains!"

Satan knows who the girl is. He then lights the room with his girls in it on fire as they stand still, obediently. I refuse to call them a coven, because first off no witches would dare go to someplace called Salem anything. You won't even catch them smoking a Salem cigarette. Typically, I think they choose Parliaments for the neat filters. Secondly, everyone who knows anything about witches knows that there is no Satan nor Saint Lucifer nor other Christian ideology in a specifically non-Christian religion. Anyway, Satan lets the girls burn, half-heartedly runs after Liz, then goes back into the burning room. She then sees him standing outside, before disappearing, leaving only a burnt patch of grass. So this means Satan got the Anti-Glee Club together, couldn't get one girl whose sister was not exactly a star player, and decided to torch the whole lot of decent, energetic, Satan-spirited young gals. Not since Bobby Knight has there been a shittier moderator for an extra-curricular activity. This movie makes me think Satan ain't such a great guy.

"Now remember: red wine with virgins. Never white, despite what one would assume."

HOME ECONOMICS IS IMPORTANT TO SATAN

"See you next summer! In Hell!"

MOST LIKELY TO DIE MYSTERIOUSLY

She's a swinger. HAHAHAHAHA!!! LOL ROTFLMAO!!!

CUT FROM THE JV LYNCHING TEAM

"So do most new students get the tour this late at night?"

80% OF THE FILM

The best trick the devil ever played was looking like an out of work soap star.

ROY THINNES AS:
TIM CURRY IN:
"THE WORST WITCH: ON ICE!"

I went to Catholic School, and those girls were seriously so much more wicked. These Satan chicks are pretty lame, really.

I went to Catholic School, and those girls were seriously so much more wicked. These Satan chicks are pretty lame, really.

THE DARK ONE CHORUS PREPARES FOR THE SPRING PAGEANT