kybearfuzz | Werewolf in a Girls' Dormitory (Reply)

Also Known as "Lycanthropus"
I love a cheesy horror flick. The local Showcase cinema was having a classic horror movie night tonight and I decided to at least go see at least one of them. So I ran out to catch Werewolf in a Girls' Dormitory, a 1961 horror flick.

The story revolves around a reformatory for girls in some unknown country where a handsome new doctor has shown up to be the new science teacher. Upon his arrival, however, a gruesome murder at the hands of a monster occurs on the school grounds. One of the girls begins to investigate, trying to find out who is the killer. The movie is campy and is one of those flicks where it was dubbed from Italian. The dialogue was sometimes awkward, like it was translated via Google and the wording didn't quite match up. Instead of saying the girl was killed, the dialogue had her "assassinated." This was repeated several times. Overall, the movie was good for what it was. However, the movie going experience left something to be desired thanks to others in the theater.

I was the first in the theater and chose the best seat in my opinion. As others arrived, things slowly started going bad.

The more minor annoyance was an older lady who trudged in after the movie started. I'll refer to her as Miss Krinkle. Miss Krinkle did what many of us do, I think. She brought her snacks with her. I admit that I did it too, bringing a couple of Halloween-sized Skittles with me. While I brought a snack, she seemed to have brought a full three-course meal. She sat in the same row as me. I refrained from looking at her, but I heard her unwrap everything. The paper and plastic rustling and crackling went on for at least ten minutes. I'm not kidding. I didn't look, but from all the noise she was creating, I swear I think she was making a sandwich instead of eating one. Either that or she decided it was a good time to start wrapping her Christmas presents.

The major annoyance was a couple of goofy guys right behind me I'll call the Gigglers. In a campy movie like this, there will always be unintentional funny moments. A corpse under the blanket is revealed and her eyes are wide-open and her face contorted into a frozen scream when most doctors would have closed both before. The reformatory girls are doing exercises in the yard with full 60's hairdos and make-up. The dialogue is odd and forced, like people reading lines from fuzzy cue-cards. All of these are reasons to laugh in my opinion.

My problem with the Gigglers is that they giggled at everything. Almost every 30 seconds or so, they'd giggle. The moon would appear, they giggled. The characters are having a discussion, they giggled. A scene changes to the exterior of the reformatory, they giggled. A girl is being attacked by the monster in a non-campy way, her screaming with her eyes wide, they giggled. I felt like there was a hidden joke in the movie that I was missing to have so much giggling happening at inappropriate times.

When the movie finished, I overheard one of the other patrons complaining to the theater managers about Miss Krinkle and the Gigglers, so thankfully it wasn't just me. I was tempted to stay for the next movie, or come back for the last movie, which was "Night of the Living Dead." However, the Gigglers had paid to see all four of the Halloween flicks tonight and I just really can't see me sitting there trying to enjoy it with them going off every few seconds. There's too much potential for ME going off on them.