The Stay Awake, Catholic High School Girls in Trouble

I remember going to the drive-in in the 70s. My dad took me to see a double feature, "The Boob Tube" and "Kentucky Fried Movie." My dad wasn't into Disney, and yes the films were inappropriate for children, but I loved it. I forget in which film, but one of the skits had a spoof of an exploitation film trailer called "Catholic High School Girls in Trouble." In it, sultry dames , in Catholic high school garb, were attacked, stripped, pulled into the shower, and...well...you can imagine. Today we have the closest thing we can find to the fulfilment of that skit, a 1988 South African horror film, "The Stay Awake," directed by John Bernard.

In 1969, 11 Catholic high school girls were brutally raped and murdered by William John Brown (Lindsay Reardon) at a Catholic girls high school...in America. Brown is executed in the gas chamber, but is in cahoots with the devil, so he will emerge 20 years later at St. Mary's Catholic High School for girls...in Europe. At the school, over the weekend, eight or nine girls are doing a stay awake to raise money for it. The chaperone is the sultry teacher, Trish (Shirley Jane Harris). As we meet the girls, Samantha (Tanya Gordon) is a nubile babe in a hot shiny aerobics outfit, leading her classmates in gratuitous and thrusting exercises. Then the ghost of Brown returns and manifests as a demon or slithery tentacle things. One by one he hunts these girls in the dark hallways, captures them, and readies them to be the brides of Satan. Happens. Oh, four boys from the local college, aware of the stay awake, sneak into the school but are summarily taken apart by a big bug-eyed demon.

One by one the girls misbehave, and some even smoke a cigarette, and go off on their own. Mistake. Now Trish tries to find the missing girls, and realizes she is battling a demon and the ghost of Brown. The demon wants Trish bad, but the cross she wears keeps it at bay. Samantha, the aerobics instructor, our favorite of the girls, screams really well and looks so helpless.  The demon sends tentacles out to capture the babes, and to...to...well, use your imagination. Now Trish realizes she must battle the ghost of Brown, kill the demon, and save the remaining nubiles.

Will the Catholic High School babes engage in catfights over boys or for who the demon will want most?  What is Trish' connection to Brown that makes her so wanted by his ghost? Is this film made by Lutherans who seek to confuse and corrupt Catholic babes? You will be waiting for the demon to screech, "THE POPE CAN'T HELP YOU NOW, HUSSIES!" This is a good and gratuitous one that most of us missed back in the 80s. For a nubile babes in peril film, see "The Stay Awake."