En route to a ritzy boarding school, naive good girl Stefanie (Diane Franklin, Better Off Dead) says to the cabbie, “I hope the girls are friendly.”

They are not. In fact, most are total bitches, simply because Stepfanie comes from a farm, not a trust fund. Despite being there on a scholarship, she’s abruptly put in her place as their inferior; after all, what kind of weirdo brings a board game? Headmistressed by It’s a Wonderful Life legend Donna Reed (in her final movie role, albeit made-for-TV), the institution teaches French, horseback riding and … homicide!

In templated one-by-one fashion, the girls are killed, each in a different way, at the hands of … well, therein lies the mystery. Needless to say, CHiPs’ officer Larry Wilcox investigates.

I’ll say this for Deadly Lessons: The reveal of the killer’s identity arrives as an absolute surprise. Clearly, this was ABC’s attempt to grab Voorhees-craving viewers, yet the limits dictated by Standards and Practices cripple efforts by director William Wiard (This House Possessed) to achieve a passing grade of terror. As a result, the bloodless movie belongs to the genre of suspense, however light.

The characters are stock, but for a story like this, they should be. So I’ll also say this for Deadly Lessons: Wiard and casting sure had good taste, snagging not only the likable Franklin, but others on the verge on breaking big — notably, Ally Sheedy, Bill Paxton, Rick Rossovich and, in the role of Fat Girl Who Eats Four Dozen Donuts, future Bart Simpson voice Nancy Cartwright. —Rod Lott

Get it at dvdrparty.

Now that circuses have been shamed out of existence, members of the next generation may be curious what they missed. On the basis of Ring of Fear, a good third of which is circus footage, not a damn thing.

As he does in the Abbott and Costello jungle jam, Africa Screams, top-billed circus mogul Clyde Beatty plays his charisma-free self, bringing (per the credits) “the entire Clyde Beatty Circus” to town. The citizens are agog at Beatty’s arrival, as if they’re getting a Costco.

Paying particular attention to the news is Dublin O’Malley (Sean McClory, The Day of the Wolves), Beatty’s former “ring director,” now in a mental institution following an unexplained incident in Iwo Jima. Dublin talks to a photograph of Beatty’s trapeze artist, Valerie (Marian Carr, Kiss Me Deadly); once upon a time, she returned Dublin’s now-delusionary pining.

Informed Valerie’s now married to a “top aerialist,” Dublin punches his way out of the asylum and, hopefully, back into her heart. (It’s tough to blame the poor chap once we finally see Valerie in all her animal-print voluptuousness.) Dublin’s plan is to get rehired with Beatty’s circus … and then sabotage it from within by rigging the big cat rope to force “accidents,” preferably fatal. For help, he recruits Twitchy (Emmett Lynn, Skirts Ahoy!), an illiterate clown.

As injuries pile past the point of coinkydink, Beatty’s right-hand man (Pat O’Brien, Billy Jack Goes to Washington) hires an investigator, bestselling mystery novelist Mickey Spillane, playing bestselling mystery novelist Mickey Spillane. Never mind asking a practitioner of detective fiction to solve a crime is like soliciting Fifty Shades of Grey author E.L. James for a blowjob, because Spillane has more screen presence than any cast member, save Carr.

Produced by John Wayne, this CinemaScope programmer is directed with indifference by James Edward Grant (the Duke’s Angel and the Badman) and improbably by the legendary William Wellman (1937’s A Star Is Born), sans credit. All the pedigree can’t make up for three-ring crowd shots bumping next to blurry stock footage, ridiculous dialogue (“You stupid, unconscious blithering idiot, you!”), weak acting by lead McClory and weakest acting by Beatty, whose bewildering response to a death is a toothy grin and shake of the head.

Also unable to save Ring of Fear from a pedestrian fate? The Thing from Another World’s Kenneth Tobey, any number of Flying Wallendas and Pedro the Kangaroo. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

To see Donald Pleasence eat sketti off a Wendy’s salad bar in Milan, you simply must see Carlo Vanzina’s Nothing Underneath.

Other reasons exist in favor of loaning your eyeballs to this bizarro giallo, in which Yellowstone National Park ranger Bob (Tom Schanley, Eruption: LA) senses — thanks to a psychic twin link — that his supermodel sister (Nicola Perring, Duet for One) is in big trouble in Italy. Bob’s not wrong; his sis has just been brutally murdered with an oversized pair of scissors! Naturally, she’s hardly the last victim, which further drives his amateur investigation once he lands in Europe to find out what’s what, aided by Pleasence’s kindly police inspector.

The inevitability of the “twist” is redeemed by the bug-nuts circumstances surrounding it. From top to bottom, Vanzina stirs up quite the ’80s buffet, offering not just lurid thrills, but cocaine, Lycra, Magnum P.I., cocaine, cocaine, “One Night in Bangkok,” Russian roulette and Danish dish Renée Simonsen. Plus, Pino Donaggio’s Body Double retread score auto-grants the film a wonderfully perverse mood it otherwise would fail to achieve throughout.

Nothing Underneath’s killer concept was back — even if Vanzina wasn’t — for 1988’s inferior sequel, Too Beautiful to Die — an obvious misnomer considering the whole movie is about models biting it. Despite the implement of doom being upgraded to a weapon from Conan the Barbarian’s closet, the movie virtually the same, Xeroxing everything from the broken glass to the frilly-undies montage. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Remember when you could sexually harass female co-workers and openly read porno mags in the workplace without fear of punishment? Apparently it was the same time the Big Three networks churned out some decent genre movies made for prime-time household consumption — specifically, 1984, when Calendar Girl Murders debuted on ABC.

This telepic’s Hugh Hefner, Paradise magazine owner Richard Trainor (Robert Culp, then on the back half of The Greatest American Hero’s run), has a special way to spotlight the dozen lovely ladies posing nude for the coming year: a television special … hosted in part by that icon of testosterone, comedian Rip Taylor. Unfortunately for Trainor, someone else has a different special way to spotlight them: homicide! Miss January is shoved off a hotel balcony; Miss February (Claudia Christian, Half Past Dead) is stabbed while raiding the fridge.

Assigned to the case is midlife-crisis cop Lt. Stoner (Tom Skerritt, Alien), much to the chagrin of his “meh” wife (Barbara Bosson, The Last Starfighter) and the delight of his masturbating teen son (Jonathan Aluzas, Monster in the Closet).

A tip on a photographer who gives the girls the heebie-jeebies leads Stoner to interview former Paradise Angel of the Year Cassie Bascomb (Sharon Stone), and somehow, that creepy shutterbug is not the one played here by Alan Thicke. In a preview of the beautiful Stone’s Basic Instinct breakthrough to come in eight years’ time, Bascomb and Stoner embark in a YMCA-shower-steamy affair while bodies keep turning up. Somehow, one girl manages to be drowned in a busy pool at one of Trainor’s legendary parties. (Then again, with the night containing both an impromptu breakdance and Culp in a Speedo, that’s a shitload of diversion.)

So whodunit? Exactly whom you’ll expect. As predictable as that ending may be, the culprit’s motive is a truly histrionic howler of mid-’80s pop psychology. In the hypothetic hands of, say, Dario Argento, something titled Calendar Girl Murders could be something really special by being really sleazy; in the actual hands of TVM vet William A. Graham (Shark Kill), however, it’s hardly titillating. With Calendar Girl Murders being a Sunday-night movie, its centerfolds — er, calendar girls — sport the most demure one-piece swimsuits and leotards a Sunday-night movie could get away with immediately following an ep of Hardcastle and McCormick. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Puzzle’s title refers to the amnesia of Peter (Luc Merenda, Shoot First… Die Later), a man who recalls nothing about himself eight months after a car accident. Shortly after the film begins, he’s fortunate enough to learn that he:
• has a wife named Sara (the splendiferous Senta Berger, Killing Cars)
• was a con artist who pissed off a lot of people
• is in possession of something for which said people are willing to kill

But whom and what? The movie’s very name clues viewers in that the best way to experience Puzzle is to go in knowing as little as possible, so you can investigate as much as Peter. To encourage that, I’ll reveal no further plot. Besides, you already know Chekov’s principle that if a chainsaw is left carelessly on the kitchen table in Act 1, it’s going to come in handy in Act 3, right?

Hitchcockian on paper, Puzzle comes well-constructed by co-writer Ernesto Gastaldi, who’s penned more great gialli than you have fingers, including Torso, All the Colors of the Dark, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, et al. If the screenplay can be faulted for anything, it’s that having so few characters makes the perp obvious sooner than director Duccio Tessari (The Bloodstained Butterfly) may have liked. Still, the film’s best sequence arrives after the reveal, with suspense simmering toward a strong boil as three separate elements in a room rather ingeniously threaten to place Sara in mortal danger. Tessari pays it off with intense slow-motion shots that make up for questionable close-ups of mouths (complete with crumbs on lips) early on.

Co-stars include Anita Strindberg (Lucio Fulci’s A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin); Bruno Corazzari (Fulci’s The Psychic), whose allergy-ridden character dispenses Kleenex as he does story points; and child Duilio Cruciani (Fulci’s Don’t Torture a Duckling). As usual with the giallo, the setting is so magnificent, Puzzle appears to have been made with the assistance of Italy’s tourism council. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.