Ever made it with a chick in a trance before? Then you’ll love DELINQUENT SCHOOL GIRLS (1975)

Posted by Daniel Metz

This week, we were lucky enough to experience one of the all-time great Weird Wednesday presentations. For those of you keeping track, our last trip to perfect exploitation was one month ago, the fabulous and madcap Lord Love a Duck. Well, ten years after that film, schlockmeisters still knew how to please, as was evident in Delinquent School Girls.

Generically, the film is probably classified as a sex comedy, though it might better be described as a rape comedy. The film is basically a series of rapes, played for laughs. The victims scream during the lead-up, but (almost) all of them leave the situation satisfied and wanting more. Rape is a disgusting and wretched thing, and isn’t something to take as lightly as the film does.

A Mexican ad for the film shows very little about what the film is about

That said, it seems that exploitation films have a predilection toward rape. For example, of the eight Weird Wednesday films thus far in 2010, six of them include rape: Kill Squad, Poor Pretty Eddie, Black Caesar, Cry of a Prostitute, Terminal Island, and Delinquent School Girls. This ratio ain’t great, but it shows us something. I don’t think I want to explore that “something,” though, because it might make watching these movies less fun for me.

So, outrage aside, we should view this film as the triumph in surreal sexual fantasy/id indulgence that it is. The plot concerns three mental patients who escape their asylum and take refuge in a, you guessed it, boarding school for girls. An added twist: it is the winter holiday, and all of the students are at home EXCEPT for the girls who misbehave, who are forced to stay on campus as punishment.

An alternate title for the film: CARNAL MADNESS. This poster is actually the best representation of the plot.

Thankfully, these deranged maniacs are not the scary kind featured in Shutter Island, but rather they are of the hilarious variety. Their experience on the lam is a series of misadventures and hi jinx. They drunkenly sing, they come up with harebrained schemes (like using blocks of ice as a door-lock timer). They have so many opportunities to escape and be free, but their madness/sexual perversity continuously gets the best of them, roping them back to the school over and over and ultimately resulting in their arrest.

So what makes this film great? Well, it’s really the convergence of the bizarre and the Bakhtinian that makes this film a carnival of sexual madness. The three protagonists are such wonderfully defined characters, each expressing something wholly unique and stupefying.

The leader, Clooney, is abusive to his partners and constantly does impersonations. Bruce, a homosexual, serves as comic relief bby standing watch over the rapes and lamenting the absence of good looking men. The wild card, African American Richard “Big Dick” Peters, is the truly deranged one, repeatedly leading the group into trouble by hounding after the girls; what’s truly wacky is that his gestures are mostly voiced as altruistic: “I’ve got to go give them the time of their lives,” that kind of thing.

The girls, from a pretty good angle if you ask me...

The girls represent another transgressive element of the film. They are unbound and sinister, demented in their sexual energy and confused in their youth. All of them are impossibly bosomed; this film is like a goofy Russ Meyer movie. In one scene, to get back at their strict principal, the girls decide to not wear their bras to gym class. “We’ll show that chauvinist pig” the leader says. Yeah, you’ll show him.

All of this is not to say there is no art in the film. The picture is constantly making references to cultural objects of old; displayed prominently in different scenes are a copy of Catch-22, a Benny Goodman record, and other social ephemera, and the dialogue, especially that of the impersonator Clooney, is referential to classic works of film and literature (“What a dump!” he exclaims, quoting Liz Taylor quoting Bette Davis). The camera work is often inspired, and some of the sex acts are filmed with homage to A Clockwork Orange.

There is much brilliance in Delinquent School Girls. There is a rule of thumb for exploitation film titles: the better the title, the worse the movie, and vice versa. The idea behind that is that good titles are saved for poor pictures. Most of the time, when there is a juicy title, such as The Devil’s Wedding Night or Voodoo Black Exorcist, it is going to be a horrible movie.

There are rare exceptions to this rule, however. Super Fly is one. The Sinful Dwarf. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! These are great exploitation films with great titles. I would say that Delinquent School Girls is another.