Although any number of Italian gialli ("Nude Si Muore", "What Have You Done to Solange?", etc.) were set in Britain and/or were UK co-productions, this film is somewhat unique in that it seems to be a completely British giallo. We're definitely in giallo territory here: There's a vicious rapist-murderer on the loose at a girl's school. There are two witnesses to the murder--one who can't quite remember what she saw (a familiar plot-line in the Italian films)and a previous rape victim who is too traumatized to speak. The lead is Suzy Kendall, who two years earlier had starred in Dario Argento's seminal giallo "The Bird with Crystal Plumage." It's definitely a very British film, however. The cinematography is staid and workman-like compared to the more garish and stylistic Italian films. The plot is fairly linear and logical, at least until the end when the murderer-rapist goes to laughably ridiculous lengths to stop a psychiatrist from giving sodium pentathlon to the traumatized victim to help her recover her memory.
It's not surprising given the famed British aversion to violence (in movies that is)that most of the violence here takes place off-screen. Still it is pretty nasty violence, especially considering the rape angle and the age and gender of the victims. (It's interesting that these kinds of movies never take place at a MEN'S college or in an old age home). The sex and nudity is also pretty non-existent, but it doesn't exactly seem wholesome either the way they have cast sexy twenty year olds as fifteen year olds and dressed them in mini-skirts short enough to get any real schoolgirl expelled. The most lurid scene involves the headmistress's lecherous husband and a student librarian on a ladder. I don't know if it makes it more or less perverse that the "student" is played by Janet Lynn, a British sex star of the period (thus the obvious pseudonym)who had been featured the year before in Pete Walker's naked sex romp "Cool It, Carol". The only really recognizable star though, besides Suzy Kendall, is a young Leslie-Anne Down as the traumatized rape victim. (Despite what an earlier reviewer said, Jenny Agutter is NOT in this movie).
Still if you can get around the leering British hypocrisy, the relative lack of sex and violence, and the fairly low-wattage of the star power, this is actually a pretty entertaining little film, and, if nothing else, an interesting one.
