Severin Films puts the "ghoul in school" with their Blu-ray of WEREWOLF IN A GIRLS' DORMINTORY.

Although found innocent of a patient's death, Julian Olcott (Carl Schell, THE BLUE MAX) nevertheless lost his license to practice medicine and it was only through the favor of a colleague that he gets a job a science teacher at a Scottish girls' reformatory school overseen by director Swift (Curt Lowens, MANDROID) with the charitable financial support of local bigwig Sir Alfred Whiteman (Maurice Marsac, CAPRICE). On the very night of Olcott's arrival, pupil Mary Smith sneaks out of the infirmary so that she can meet lover Whiteman who she is blackmailing to get her a pardon. When she turns up brutally mauled the next day, the authorities believe it to be the work of wolves, but Priscilla (Barbara Lass, the first Mrs. Polanski) starts to believe otherwise when she opens a threatening letter addressed to Mary. When the letter disappears and no one believes her, Mary sets herself up with reformatory caretaker Walter (Luciano Pigozzi, BARON BLOOD) for an assignation with Whiteman only for his imperious wife Sheena (Annie Steinert) to inform the girl that her husband did not murder Mary and she saw the actual assailant but refuses to divulge the identity for fear of greater scandal than her husband has already brought them. When Priscilla survives a near-death encounter with the vicious killer, the locals form a mob to catch a sex maniac but Olcott suspects a case of lycanthropy as the attacks took place during the full moon. He reveals to Swift and his faithful assistant Lenore (Grace Neame) that he has been experimenting with treating lycanthropy which is not a psychological disorder but causes chemical and physical changes in the pituitary gland.

While it would seem that there actually is a WEREWOLF IN A GIRLS' DORMITORY, there are also plenty of red herring suspects whose ulterior motives put them in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hiding behind a wonderfully exploitative title is one of the lower-tier Italian gothic horror films LYCANTHROPUS which, like PLAYGIRLS AND THE VAMPIRE and THE VAMPIRE AND THE BALLERINA, transposes its gothic elements to the present day; however, the early screenwriting assignment of Ernesto Gastaldi (THE HORRIBLE DR. HICHCOCK) plays more like a giallo even though we know the culprit to be a monster and are very sure of his identity. Apart from the nighttime stalking sequences and a surprisingly graphic opening murders, the direction of Paolo Heusch – whose earlier science fiction film THE DAY THE SKY EXPLODED was actually helmed by Mario Bava – is rather flat, but Lass is a striking girl-in-peril, Schell (brother of Maximillian and Maria) a serviceable hero, and Lowens (dubbing himself) a grandly sinister presence who should have been cast in more Italian genre films. The monster make-up is actually quite striking with drooling fangs and a demonic-looking forehead appliance, but the bulk of the atmosphere is achieved by the scoring of Armando Travajoli (SCENT OF A WOMAN). Strangely, in spite of its flaws, it possesses the same guilty pleasure viewing value of the aforementioned vampire films and such stupefying contemporary entries like TOMB OF TORTURE.

Released theatrically by MGM in a double feature with the British Richard Gordon production CORRIDORS OF BLOOD, with the original title sequence replaed with a short sequence accompanied by a snippet from the novelty single "The Ghoul in School" by The Fortunes (only slightly more than excerpted in the American trailer). The film had no official American home video release, coming to VHS from Sinister Cinema, the source of a number of public domain DVDs. Fred Olen Ray's Retromedia Entertainment put out a DVD featuring an okay letterboxed transfer that replaced "The Ghoul in School" with music from elsewhere in the film out of concerns for music rights (MGM's current TV master deleted the title sequence entirely) but included an audio commentary track by actor Lowens moderated by David Del Valle. Derived from a 2K scan of Italian vault materials, Severin's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.66:1 widescreen Blu-ray restores the Italian title sequence which appears to make up the difference in running times between the Italian and American versions (checking one of the PD versions online reveals that the first killing was always that graphic just more shocking here with greater clarity), with restored shots that include the first victim's body hitting the water (the splash is heard during a cutaway to the moon) and a brief view of a breast when all the girls wake up to one of the girls being smothered in the dormitory. Although black levels might be a little inconsistent and skintones seem bit more grayer than lighter, the presentation is a revelation as far as the darker sequences where facial features could be lost in the highlights and the castle locations and set dressings receded into the background giving the impression of a film as cheap as the budget likely was. The Italian DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track sounds a little cleaner than the English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 track, and English subtitles are available for both. The Italian track with subtitles plays a bit more energetically, with the matching of the phonetic English in the other dub leading to some bland line readings (and the awkward use of "assassinated" when "murdered" would be more appropriate).

Ported from the Retromedia DVD is the audio commentary by actor Lowens moderated by film historian David Del Valle. Apart from discussion of the make-up and his co-stars – particularly Lass, Schell, and Marsac – Lowens' remarks about the film are mainly from a viewer perspective, but he seems to have enjoyed the film. More of his discussion focuses on being a working actor in Italy at the time and in Hollywood later on, his roles in more prestigious Italian and European films, and some of his mutual acquaintances with Del Valle (Lowens knew Barbara Steele in Italy but would come to collaborate with her when she was producing Dan Curtis' THE WINDS OF WAR and WAR AND REMEBRANCE series on which he did vocal work). Del Valle provides some background on Italian horror, noting the attempts to disguise the parentage of the films with British and American names (however, he does make the error of suggesting that pseudonymous cinematographer George Patrick is the same person as the British art director by the same name, although IMDb lists the real cinematographer as veteran technician Renato Del Frate who died a year after the film's production). In his remarks about werewolf cinema, Del Valle mentions that Paul Naschy told him that WEREWOLF IN A GIRLS' DORMITORY was a film he had always wanted to see because of the promotional photographs of the werewolf (cues from Travajoli's score along with his ATOM AGE VAMPIRE would find their way into the CAM-licensed score of some of Naschy's films).