Carlos Enrique Taboada (1929-1997) were Mexico's most
famous maker of supernatural ghost stories with films like this one,
the
1968 "Hasta el viento tiene miedo/Even the Wind is Afraid",
the 1969 "El libro de piedra/The Book of Stone", 1975 "Más
negro
que la noche/Blacker than the Night" and his last film, and my
favourite, the 1984 "Veneno para las hadas/Poison for the Fairies"
and hopefully his other films will also be available on bluray soon.
He worked as a scriptwriter for a decade before starting to direct his
own films.
This ghost mystery in color tells the story of how a
group of six girls, plus one .... the snitching to the headmistress
one, in an
all-girl boarding school makes trouble for the strict headmistress and
are punished by being grounded at school during a vacation.
All the girls have to wear red school uniforms and some of them looks
like they were 25 - 30 years old.
Somehow the unruly girls, the boarding school, dining room with the
staff and the girls and the beautiful but strict headmistress
reminded me of Narciso Ibañez Serrador's 1969 "La Residencia"
and the set-up with female students being grounded or otherwise
forced to stay at school during a vacation, that is a common plot element
in the Slashers that followed some decade later, with the
difference that it's a ghost harassing them here and a psychopath killer
with a big knife in the slashers.
The Story:
Female student Claudia (Alicia Bonet) has nightmares
where she's called by a voice and in the dream she enters a room where
a
woman is hanging from the ceiling. There's a locked Tower-like structure
on the ground of the boarding school, and when Claudia
and her friends one day find it unlocked they enter. This is the place
of my dream says Claudia but before entering the attic room
the headmistress turns up and stops them. As punishment for entering
an off-limit area they are grounded in school during the
up-coming vacation. Six girls, Claudia, Kitty (Norma Lazareno), Marina
etc., the unpopular snitching one Josefina (Elizabeth
Dupeyron), the headmistres Ms. Bernard (Marga Lopez) and her assistant
Ms. Lucía (Maricruz Olivier) are left.
Spookery follows.
Note that the audio track is pretty bad and
that this may be a DVD transfer, the picture is OK but not very crisp.
Also, this
seems to be a BD-R disc and not a regular Bluray. Well, it
have to do until Taboada's horror quartet have perfect releases.
The film is presented probably (not stated on sleeve)
in widescreen 1.78:1 with spanish audio with english subtitles, region
all