Deadly Lessons

Plot synopsis:
A teenaged girl, Stephanie Aggiston, is sent to Starkwater Hall Boarding School, a prestigious private girl's academy for the summer to brush up on Advanced French. Stephanie is a country girl and finds the school to be a bit snobbish. She makes friends with Marita Armstrong, Cally and Shama, who is a Saudi princess and her roommate.
Murders began occurring and Det. Russ Kemper comes to investigate. As more girls are killed, everyone worries about who will be next. Stephanie attempts to find the murderer herself. She enlists the help of the new attractive stable-boy, Eddie, who falls in love with her for 'not being like the other girls.' Suspicion soon falls on Eddie as the murderer.
As the summer progresses, the girls are slowly evacuated from the school. Marita is kidnapped on the day she is set to leave by the school's janitor, Robert. Robert bounds and gags Marita in his quarters on campus, somehow deluded into thinking his daughter was Marita's mother (which is not true). When Marita is able to signal from her captivity, Stephanie has Kemper follow her as she heads out "alone" to attract Robert's attention, allowing Kemper to make an arrest and save Marita.
Later, Stephanie is ambushed and chased by a mysterious figure, dressed all in black. The person is revealed to be Kemper, the real killer. The first death, Tember Logan, was an accident, as she drowned. It gave Kemper the idea to kill the other victims as a means of getting revenge on Miss Wade, who is revealed to be his mother, for abandoning him as a child. The murders were a means of ruining the reputations of her and the school. He is taken away and apprehended.

Tags: cult, murder

Review:
the girls at Starkwater Hall Boarding School are about to get a lesson in terror!.
When girls at Starkwater Hall Boarding School start turning up dead, a group of friends are determined to find out who's doing it.
But will they before it's too late?
It's a pretty good movie but slasher fans will be disappointed from the lack of blood.
There's none, but there is an okay suspense scene at the end..
Still have this one on tape.....
It's great to see at least a few posts on this good little t.v. slasher.
I still pull out my old VHS of the NBC premiere just to see what television was like especially considering the current, sad state of the tube now where commercial blurbs are at the bottom, top and sides of squashed, mashed and castrated film & program credits and huge bylines slapped across the screen to remind you of what you are watching!
Well, I can't really add to what's been said about this film except that it got some great play time on TBS in the late '80s and in an interview shortly before she died, Donna Reed lambasted the film as 'very cheap and on the sleazy side'!
Nothing of the sort, I actually double featured this with Wes Craven's Scream for a couple of friends of mine and they really got into it.
When will tele-flicks like this get their due?.
Pretty good TV 'slasher' movie.
I thought this movie was pretty good.
It's like a 'Scream' movie without the gore and a large variety of suspects.
Donna Reed adds a classy touch to the proceedings and Ally Sheedy is shown just before she hit stardom with 'WarGames'.
Hopefully this film will be shown on TV soon..
"Holy Grail" made-for-TV slasher movie.
This kind of a holy grail among both slasher films and TV movies because it is BOTH a slasher film and a TV movie, which means that as a slasher film it is much harder to find than the cinematic ones which are all getting the deluxe DVD treatment these days no matter how godawful they are, and as a TV movie it is one the few that is NOT totally worthless.
Needless to say there is very little blood and no nudity here, but its gratifying to read that Donna Reed still considered it "sleazy" (that's as good as "thumbs up" from Ebert and Roeper for me).The very familiar plot involves mysterious murders at a prestigious girl's school run by Donna Reed.
The most familiar actor is probably Bill Paxton, who also appeared in the cinematic slasher "Mortuary" before making it big with "Weird Science" and "Aliens".
The lead is the chronically cute Dianne Franklin, who is not great here but sure is easy to look at and highly stalk-able.
She was not in nearly enough movies.
The same can not be said, unfortunately, for her main co-star Ally Sheedy, but you'll be glad to know she ends up bound and gagged at one point here (two more thumbs up!).
Then, even more obscure than Franklin, there's Krista Erickson who played the original "mean girl" in the summer camp classic "Little Darlings" and also enjoyed a brief career as a really nice piece of acting talent in the kind of movies that play late at night on cable television.Unfortunately, the only way to see this movie right now is to also catch it late at night on one of the Turner Stations (which is how I saw, but unfortunately didn't record, it).
But, hey, if anyone reading this is a mover and shaker at Turner, this would be a great choice for a DVD release..
Who wants to see an '80s slasher without gore or nudity?.
In the early 1980s, making a teen slasher movie solely intended for distribution via cable television was either a very courageous undertaking or a very ignorant one.
If you ask me, it was a very ignorant one because 80s slashers could only distinguish themselves from the massive competition in two areas, namely the depiction of nasty gore (various & ingenious methods for killing dumb teenagers) and explicit sleaze (beauties showering or having premarital sex moments before getting killed).
Being a TV-movie, "Deadly Lessons" couldn't feature any of these two sub-genre trademarks and the consequences are irreversible now.
Today, practically all contemporary slasher movies have received fancy DVD-releases and often enjoy massive cult reputations even though many of them downright suck, whereas "Deadly Lessons" is entirely forgotten and obscure.
Numerous TV thrillers and horror movies from the 70s decade are still around and popular, however, but that's because they often benefited from an exceptionally great screenplay or a uniquely suspenseful atmosphere.
Apart from being blood-free and sleaze-free, "Deadly Lessons" also has the bad luck of being very mundane, dullish and unremarkable from all possible viewpoints.
The setting, pacing, story and denouement are standard slasher material.
It's not worse, but certainly not any better than the rest of the 80s slashers, but at least all the others showcased gruesome murders and gratuitous nudity.
In an exclusive all-girls boarding school, one of the students is found drowned in a lake.
It looks like an unfortunate accident, but police detective Kemper immediately suspects that she was murdered.
He's quickly proven right, as more girls are turning up dead while fear and hysteria are taking over the daily life at school.
Prime suspects include the handsome but bizarre stable boy, the obligatory old & creepy janitor, the eccentric French teacher and maybe even the sophisticated but uptight school principal Mrs. Wade.
The climax is implausible and far-fetched, but I'm not deducting any points for that since it was also a typical slasher trademark in the eighties.
If you have too much free time on your hands, "Deadly Lessons" might still be worth seeking out in case you like horror curiosities, or to see a few stars in their earliest roles, like Bill Paxton, Ally Sheedy and Nancy Cartwright (yes, she who does Bart Simpson's voice).
not bad slasher flick..
Not bad "slasher" Movie with a great cast.
It's about a psychopath who stalks an exclusive girls' school headed by Donna Reed.
Among the ill-fated students are Diane Franklin (Better off Dead), Ally Sheedy (The Breakfast Club, Maid to Order), and Renee Jones (Friday the 13th Part 6).
Larry Wilcox plays the cop hot on the murderer's trail, whoever he may be..
Made for TV slasher.
On March 7, 1983, ABC presented this slasher movie of sorts that's packed with plenty of great talent and enough twists to get you from commercial break to commercial break.Stephanie Aggiston (Diane Franklin, Better Off Dead, Amityville II: The Possession) is spending the summer at Starkweather Hall, a rich girl's boarding school.
She's a simple young lady, so she doesn't fit in at first, but soon makes friends with Marita (Ally Sheedy), Calli and Shama, her Saudi princess roommate.Everything seems to be going well until the murders start.
Detective Russ Kemper comes to investigate and you know he's a cop, because Larry Wilcox (Jon from CHiPs) plays him.
Instead of waiting to learn who the killer is, Stephanie decides to play investigator with the help of stable boy Eddie Fox (Bill Paxton).This movie is packed with red herrings, like the school janitor who thinks that Marita's mother was his daughter.
But the truth?
It's the cop!
His mother, headmistress Miss Wade (Donna Reed!) abandoned him as a child.
Therefore, he's going to take away the lives of these girls that she loves and ruin her school.Written by Jennifer Miller (who brought The Dark Secret of Harvest Home to TV) and directed by TV movie master William Wiard (This House Possessed, Fantasies), this is a fine way to pass some time and play spot the future star..
Silly whodunnit.
Paxton is barely in it..
A girl goes to boarding school, where the girls start getting murdered, and all the male staff are suspects.
Quite possibly the biggest anti-climatic ending I've ever seen in a horror/whodunnit movie.Bill plays a stablehand who is supposed to be the love interest with the main actress (according to the script), but their interaction consists of hanging out for about 10 minutes talking while Bill brushes down the horses, sharing one kiss, then they part forever.Actors include: Donna Reed, famous for the Donna Reed Show (if you didn't watch TV in the 50s, you probably don't know it) Ally Sheedy, (most famous from The Breakfast Club) who played a serial killer in the highly-recommended sitcom Psych and was most recently in X-Men: Apocalypse.Larry Wilcox, who co-starred in CHiPS, he also plays a cop in this movie Nancy Cartwright, who became famous for voicing many, many cartoons, including Chuckie from Rugrats, and Bart from The Simpsons TLDR; silly movie.
give it a miss..
Doomed Girls.
There's a hint of cinematic exploitation in this made for TV movie about a boarding school full of pretty rich girls stalked by a phantom killer.
Enter Diane Franklin as the new girl, taking everything in with a naïve, vulnerable expression and meeting each character along with the audience.
There's Ally Sheedy as a rich girl and a host of others, including Bart Simpson's voice Nancy Cartwright, most getting picked off by a mysterious killer within the Southern plantation style campus.The mystery aspect works good – it's hard to tell who the culprit might be.
Perhaps Bill Paxton as a seemingly kindhearted horse-trainer or the classy French teacher.
Our only hope in stopping the killings, which occur mostly off screen (if you don't jot down each victim's names you'll forget who dies or lives), is Larry Wilcox as a local plainclothes investigator with a chip on his shoulder and a particular dislike for pompous school owner Donna Reed.An intriguing body count premise where the spoiled beauties, like in any horror film template, are put through the ringer.
And the "who done it" finale turns out somewhat creative.For More Reviews: www.cultfilmfreak.com