The Boarding School Murders (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

As for the third Lifetime movie in our January 14 triptych, The Boarding School Murders, it was by far the weakest of the three, filled with silly plot twists and a barely credible storyline. This time the damsel in distress is Frankie Logan (Hannah Galway), who despite a lousy family background – her dad is a career criminal who’s been able to escape prison only by pleading insanity and being sentenced to a mental institution instead, and she herself along with her friend Trina (Victoria Lenhart) is wanted for shoplifting a cheap plastic bracelet which Frankie is still wearing throughout the film. The story starts in New York City, where Frankie is living in foster care and is about to age out of the system, but she’s applied to a scholarship to an ultra-exclusive women’s college in Limoux, Switzerland. Alas, once she gets there (she receives word that she won the scholarship via text message, e-mail or some other verbal communication she receives on her cell phone) she’s beset by a hard-assed headmistress, June Ainsworth (Christina Cox) and a bunch of classmates who make it clear to her that they consider her unworthy of the honor of being among them. (It reminded me of George Orwell’s famous autobiographical sketch, “Such, Such Were the Joys … ,” about his own experiences as a scholarship student in a boarding school and the hell he was put through by the boys whose parents were paying their way out of pocket.) Among Frankie’s tormentors are Tinsley Wellington (Katia Edith Wood), a blonde bitch who wears her sense of entitlement like a suit of armor and declares to Frankie, “I own you,” once she finds out Frankie is an accused shoplifter back home; Annabella Volkov (Ksenia Daniela Kharmalova) – shouldn’t the last name be “Volkova”? – the daughter of a Russian oligarch (at least until he gets on the bad side of Vladimir Putin, I couldn’t help but think); and Maria Lewis (Eve Edwards). Frankie’s only friend at school is Jacqueline (Nicole Amber Farrugia – does virtually everyone in this movie have three names?), a fellow outcast.

Early on in the movie Tinsley Wellington ends up dead – she falls down a flight of stairs in the main building – and at first the cops, led by Swiss detective Krause (Guy Sprung), whose mishmosh of an accent reminded Charles of Hogan’s Heroes, rule it an accident. Then an autopsy reveals she was deliberately injected with alcohol and Valium and Frankie emerges as the prime suspect in Tinsley’s murder just because she’s the newbie, and a scholarship kid from a criminal family at that. At one point Miss Ainsworth orders Frankie, Jacqueline, Annabella and Maria to assist the gardener in planting the school’s prize flowers, and specifies that they must handle the manure used to fertilize them with their bare hands. (Later Maria decides she actually likes doing this and she’s going to make gardening her future career.) Frankie starts to suspect Miss Ainsworth of the murder, and so did my husband Charles if only because Miss Ainsworth pointed to an especially elaborate chair in the school’s lobby and said it was the property of the first King of Switzerland. “There was never a King of Switzerland,” Charles told me. (I just looked that up online at https://www.quora.com/Who-is-the-king-of-Switzerland, and found that while there has never been a “king of Switzerland,” the Habsburg family did come from a small castle in Lenzburg, part of modern-day Switzerland, before they moved to more opulent quarters in Austria 1,000 years ago.) Though the film is called The Boarding School Murders – plural – the second murder doesn’t occur until nearly an hour’s worth of running time after the first, and it isn’t even a fully completed murder. Maria Lewis gets hit on the head with a shovel and is rendered comatose for most of the rest of the movie, but not dead. Though Frankie was the one who reported seeing a figure in a hoodie take Maria’s body to the garden after the assault, the school authorities suspect Frankie once again and Detective Krause arrests her for both Tinsley’s murder and Maria’s assault.

They hold her in a cell that actually looks considerably nicer than its equivalent in a U.S. jail, with a sink separate from the toilet (most American prisons have combined sink/toilet fixtures, which I know because while I was in junior college student government, for some reason we received a catalog from a company that made them), before she’s released for lack of evidence. Eventually Frankie learns from her lock-picking skills (there are some advantages to having grown up with a criminal dad!) that in 2007 Miss Ainsworth had an affair with Mr. Limoux (Douglas Kidd), heir to the fortune that founded the Limoux school in the first place and built the castle it’s in. She got pregnant by him and gave birth to a daughter who was placed in foster care. Frankie’s friend Jacqueline was the daughter, and she blackmailed her way into attending the college and also made sure Frankie was awarded the scholarship so when she started knocking off all the people she didn’t like, including her parents, she’d have Frankie there as a fall gal. The Boarding School Murders is Lifetime at its silliest, complete with plenty of shots of Frankie hiding in corners or under Miss Ainsworth’s bed when people she’s counted on being absent show up unexpectedly early. Charles said it reminded him of Young Frankenstein, particularly in the character of Miss Ainsworth, who put him in mind of “Frau Blücher” (Cloris Leachman), the forbidding matron whose name was always accompanied by a horse’s neigh. (More recently Dave Hurwitz has used the same gimmick on his Classics Today YouTube videos when he mentions composer Anton Bruckner and the insane cult that’s sprung up around him and in particular the multiple variations that exist of his symphonies, since Bruckner was chronically uncertain about how his music should go and often accepted the suggestions of well-meaning friends to rewrite it.) The Boarding School Murders was a project of the Johnson Production Group, and its writers (Jason Byers and Richard Pierce) and director (Alexandre Carrière) were old hands with that enterprise – and it shows. There are some nice Gothic exterior shots of Limoux Castle (another element that reminded Charles of Young Frankenstein) but precious little is done with them. It’s just another “blah” Lifetime movie, too silly to be scary while not quite bad enough to be camp.