DELINQUENT SCHOOLGIRLS (1975)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

One online review of this 1975 sleaze-fest was that it offered viewers a sampling of different erotic fantasies. But as it happens, writer-director Greg Corarito made one male fantasy constant to almost all of those presented here: the fantasy of hot women being not just as horny as men, but just as indiscriminate.

I haven't seen three of the five films Corarito directed in his short career, but SCHOOLGIRLS seems to recycle, and expand upon, an incident in 1969's WANDA THE SADISTIC HYPNOTIST. That psuedo-arty grindhouse item concerned two rich lesbians who had the habit of capturing wayward men and using hypnotism to subject them to various indignities. As I noted in my review, there's a very brief "male revolt" in that an escapee from an asylum invades the lesbians' mansion and gets the upper hand-- although the revolt is short-lived and the film ends with the women back in control of their project.

SCHOOLGIRLS centers upon three "psychotics" who escape from a madhouse, which is where the film gets its alternate title of CARNAL MADNESS. However, since the film's theme concerns the aforementioned fantasy of female concupiscence, SCHOOLGIRLS remains the better title. A lot of films depict helpless women being held captive by marauding males, but these schoolgirls are in their way just as dangerous as the mesmerizing lesbians of WANDA.

The school in question is a correctional institution for wayward young women, where the majority of enrollees are about to leave the campus for an unspecified holiday. But about fifteen or so hot young women are not allowed to leave due to "delinquent" behavior, and those fifteen-- though only about six have speaking roles-- continue to have classes with a skeleton crew of instructors. Not all of the young ladies are horny, though the least lust-filled, Greta the Ardent Feminist (XXX actress Sharon Kelly), ends up serving the male audience by persuading other females not to wear their bras. Penny is the most man-hungry, while naive young Betsy forms a curious attachment to her fifty-something sex-ed teacher Mister Miller, because she says he reminds her of her uncle. (Insert "bad uncle joke" here.) Though the institution seems to be secular, often the girls are seen in approximations of Catholic schoolgirl outfits.

Into this largely feminine domain, where only two male professionals are in attendance, barge the three wild and crazy guys. The de facto leader is Carl (Michael Pataki), who does celebrity impressions at the drop of a hat. The second fellow is Bruce (Steven Stucker), a swishy homosexual. The third is Dick (Bob Minor), a randy guy who ends up pulling the other two into his desires for satisfaction. That satisfaction could potentially allow for rape, though the three malcontents are such goofs that it's impossible to take them seriously.

After escaping the nuthouse, the dumbbells stumble across a farmhouse, occupied by a grizzled farmer and his frustrated young wife. The trio pick up a couple of weapons here, while Dick gets to vent his passion on a woman who only pretends "maidenly resistance."

Then the threesome stop at the school, raiding the kitchen for food. Two busty female cooks catch them, but do the two young women run to get the authorities? No, they attack the three guys with such weapons as rolls of salami, so of course the ladies get overwhelmed pretty quickly. But probably they don't suffer anything more than a little groping, since they're later seen playing cards with the goofs. (Aren't the guys supposed to be trying to escape the law as expeditiously as possible?)

Slightly before the advent of the nutsies, Betsy visited her secret crush Mister Miller. It turned out that he's got a thing for her too, but he has a weird way of showing it, that of putting her under full hypnosis (more on this later). During Betsy's second visit to Miller, all unaware of what he does with her, the three bozos witness Miller's peccadillo. They break in, perhaps hoping to get in on Miller's action. However, in his capacity as a biology teacher Miller has a tankful of (non-poisonous) snakes to hand, and he drives the psychos away with his serpents, just before Miller himself suffers a heart attack. 

The two non-gay bozos chat up a couple of girls smoking MJ, and both ladies seem amenable to some fun with complete strangers, until Carl and Dick honk them off. The females try to run, but Bruce cows them with his rifle-- and presumably they get tied up and left somewhere, because they aren't seen again. While Carl and Bruce try to find transportation, Dick comes across another two busty beauties playing polo-- at night, no less-- and tries to get grabby. The girls beat him with their mallets but get caught by Carl and Bruce, and Carl threatens the two women into fighting one another. (Just to keep things comic, he admits to Dick that he had no intention of killing either of them.)

Then there's the big finisher, when the psychos barge in on a karate class, where a male karate instructor is teaching about 12 girls. Penny is there and seems more than willing to be abducted and ravished by Big Dick. Carl, though, has an itch to play director, and he wants all the girls to perform a chorus line, but without a certain item of feminine protection. This sparks a fight between Dick and Feminist Greta (and Sharon Kelly seems to have done a fair amount of training to perform things like a stomach-throw). In no time, all the girls and the one male teacher swarm the goofballs and beat them down, sending them back to the bughouse-- though a coda claims that they escaped again.

None of the alleged madmen shows any real madness; they just seem like big, stupid teenagers out for sex wherever they can find it-- so none of them are "perilous psychos" in more than a naturalistic sense. Only Mister Miller's little hypnosis experiment elevates the movie into the uncanny domain, and then only because his experiment with Betsy involves using one of his non-poisonous snakes to go (one assumes) where he can't go anymore. Corarito passes over this fetishistic experiment very quickly, but both the experiment itself and the hypnosis used to achieve it constitute a bizarre crime of the uncanny kind.