Directed by Lamberto Bava and written by Dardano Sacchetti (nearly every Italian movie that you love), Roberto Gandus (Macabre, Madhouse) and Giorgio Stegani (Cannibal Holocaust), School of Fear is part of the second series of TV movies that Bava was hired to make.
Known as Alta Tensione (High Tension), the other movies in this series are The Prince of Terror, The Man Who Didn't Want to Die and Eyewitness. For TV movies, they have decent production values and allow Bava to explore some rather mature themes.
If you have children, let me remind you to never allow them to attend European educational facilities like the Swiss Richard Wagner Academy for Girls, the Tanz Akademie or the Giacomo Stuz private school. I mean, a child drowns at the beginning of this and that's moments into this movie.
Diana Berti (Alessandra Acciai) arrives at the school and instantly runs into problems. There's a deformed child in the shadows, her skirts are too short for the school's leader (Dario Nicolodi) and oh yeah, she has past traumas that the school keeps bringing to the fore. You know what isn't helping? The last teacher in her role died by going through a plate glass window and they're never fixed all that broken glass.
The real problem, as always, is the children. They play some secret game that the last teacher - the one who took a header through a closed window - was already worried about after she learned just how frightening that it can be from one of her students.
This game takes them into the abandoned parts of the school, places that are haunting for adults much less little ones. These kids, however, are borderline monsters, able to hack into video signals, showing an image of her impaled on the front gate just like the last teacher and using Diana's past sexual assault to remind her that no one will ever believe her when she tries to expose how horrible they behave.
They're right.
The children are from the upper crust, the school has too good of a reputation and after all, look how sweet these young men and women are as they sing in the choir. Surely they couldn't have done all this. Even her police inspector love interest, Mark Anselmi (Jean Hebert), thinks she's being ridiculous about it all.
This movie is absolutely wild, as it has a classroom of kids tear to pieces the morality and art of Pier Paolo Pasolini while a child who looks like a dwarf in a red jacket runs wild on the grounds.
I have no idea why neither of Bava's sets of TV movies are available in better quality in the U. S. Here's hoping with Vinegar Syndrome releasing A Blade In the Dark that they go deeper into the movies that he made as his career took him to the small screen.
Known as Alta Tensione (High Tension), the other movies in this series are The Prince of Terror, The Man Who Didn't Want to Die and Eyewitness. For TV movies, they have decent production values and allow Bava to explore some rather mature themes.
If you have children, let me remind you to never allow them to attend European educational facilities like the Swiss Richard Wagner Academy for Girls, the Tanz Akademie or the Giacomo Stuz private school. I mean, a child drowns at the beginning of this and that's moments into this movie.
Diana Berti (Alessandra Acciai) arrives at the school and instantly runs into problems. There's a deformed child in the shadows, her skirts are too short for the school's leader (Dario Nicolodi) and oh yeah, she has past traumas that the school keeps bringing to the fore. You know what isn't helping? The last teacher in her role died by going through a plate glass window and they're never fixed all that broken glass.
The real problem, as always, is the children. They play some secret game that the last teacher - the one who took a header through a closed window - was already worried about after she learned just how frightening that it can be from one of her students.
This game takes them into the abandoned parts of the school, places that are haunting for adults much less little ones. These kids, however, are borderline monsters, able to hack into video signals, showing an image of her impaled on the front gate just like the last teacher and using Diana's past sexual assault to remind her that no one will ever believe her when she tries to expose how horrible they behave.
They're right.
The children are from the upper crust, the school has too good of a reputation and after all, look how sweet these young men and women are as they sing in the choir. Surely they couldn't have done all this. Even her police inspector love interest, Mark Anselmi (Jean Hebert), thinks she's being ridiculous about it all.
This movie is absolutely wild, as it has a classroom of kids tear to pieces the morality and art of Pier Paolo Pasolini while a child who looks like a dwarf in a red jacket runs wild on the grounds.
I have no idea why neither of Bava's sets of TV movies are available in better quality in the U. S. Here's hoping with Vinegar Syndrome releasing A Blade In the Dark that they go deeper into the movies that he made as his career took him to the small screen.
