Werewolf in a Girls' Dormitory

Director: Paolo Heusch
Year released: 1961

THE CHARGE: Solicitation of horndogs who demand more negligees in their werewolf movies.

THE EVIDENCE: A werewolf. A girls' dormitory. Two great tastes with the potential to go great together, like a lycanthropic Reese's cup. But the combination turns out to be not as great as one would hope. It's decent enough, but it coughs up a couple of furballs along the way.

The movie opens with hunky young Dr. Olcott reporting for duty as a professor at a boarding school for young women. The women at the school have been branded as "troublemakers", though it's not entirely clear what kind of trouble they cause outside of being a bit sassy. Of course, the movie was released in 1961 so, at the time, that may have been enough to have women locked away.

It's soon established that the new professor has a dark secret, one that keeps him from practicing medicine, but that doesn't keep any of the girls from swooning over him. One of the more sensible girls is Priscilla, the heroine of our story and played by Barbara Lass, who is an absolutely adorable actress with eyes almost as large as an anime character's.

OMG! BEST GIRL WAIFU 4EVER! SQUEEEEEEEE!

One night, Priscilla sees one the other girls sneak away from the school grounds and grows alarmed when she doesn't return in the morning. What we, the viewers, know that Priscilla doesn't is that this girl was having an affair with a teacher for the purpose of eventually blackmailing him. The girl and the teacher have a brief meeting in the woods surrounding the school and shortly after the teacher leaves, our prospective blackmailer is pounced on and killed by a snarling beast. And by "snarling beast", I mean werewolf. And by "werewolf", I mean a guy hunched over with some fake fur glued to his face.

Upon discovery of the girl's body, the movie quickly shifts into whodunnit mode. Could the new doctor be the killer? Or is it the teacher that was the potential blackmail victim? Or maybe it's the Dean's assistant, who's definitely not Peter Lorre but walks around doing a spot-on impression of him throughout the film?

As is par for the course for movies from this era, we're treated to a lot of red herrings while discovering the secrets of many of the school's staff. It only varies from the standard Scooby-Doo formula (despite predating Scooby Doo by several years) by showing the audience the identity of the werewolf before the rest of the characters find out.

THE ACTING! IT HURRRRTS!

When we get to the film's climax, it's short and underwhelming and shows that there was no reason for the killer to be a werewolf at all. It could have been a vampire, or a serial killer, or even a garbageman, and it would have barely changed the story at all. Although "Garbageman in a Girls' Dormitory" sounds more like one of those videos they kept behind the curtain back in the VHS rental days.

That's not to say Werewolf in a Girls' Dormitory is a bad movie. It's got a certain old-school charm and the film does manage to occasionally capture the timeless look of early horror classics. But it's all done to support an unimpressive by-the-book murder mystery that's been seen hundreds of times, even by the time the movie was first released.


THE VERDICT: Werewolf in a Girls' Dormitory is GUILTY but let off with a warning for introducing me to Super Fun Best Girl OK Waifu Barbara Lass. (SQUEEEEE!!!)