This is almost unbelievable in its ineptitude. You get the feeling that some student, about a week into a course on programming has programmed a computer to write a thriller and detailed a few components; lots of vulnerable teenage girls wearing mini-skirts and stupid enough to walk through woods alone even after one of them is traumatised by a rapist;risible red herrings, a totally unrealistic newspaper reporter, and then, when it gets down to the actual writing the computer turns out to be both dyslexic and autistic. It's mind-boggling that actors like Freddy Jones and Frank Finlay can contrive to act like sub-Alan Lake and that the actual killer should be wheeled out in the last ten minutes with no preparation. Total RUBBISH!

The film, looks, sounds, 'feels' exactly typical of its period. The colour, camera angles, use of music, are similar to other films, particularly The Strange Affair, All neat in black stockings, Fright and, as biggee writes, in another review, the brilliant, almost forgotten, I start counting.Similarly the portrayal of young girls as provocative 'sex objects' without any hint of embarrassment, discernment or question, and that's not a criticism, that's what life was like - at least certainly at my school.Reasonable acting, I do like the period fashions and behaviours and cars and would watch it just for that. There are plenty of red herrings but, slight spoiler coming, if you look with care when Suzy Kendall sees the murderer in her car's rear view mirror - you only get a split second glimpse, you can see who the murderer is.

... not to mention before political correctness too. This could never be made today because now we know rape is about power, not sex. But in this film, it's all about sex, sex, sex. It's the original schoolgirl fetish film, a precursor to those Japanese tentacle films, except without tentacles.If you've read the summary, you'd know some pervert is raping schoolgirls in the woods. And killing some too. Why one girl goes through the woods directly after the first rape I dunno. Anyway it's a big mystery, and every guy is a suspect. This film has a lot of alternate titles, mostly dealing with Satan because the schoolteacher who saw the perpetrator said he "looked like Satan". Lesley Anne-Down (or however you spell it) is the lovely and barely legal (17 at the time) first victim.Okay, you've read this far, you know there's a spoiler warning, you must really wanna know something. Like who did it. It was Anthony Ainley's character. Yup. The old Master himself is the evil rapist. Who's really surprised, huh? Now excuse me, I think I'll go hop a TARDIS back to 1971 and stand in the woods while wearing a schoolgirl outfit. Aww yeah.

Although any number of Italian gialli ("Nude Si Muore", "What Have You Done to Solange?", etc.) were set in Britain and/or were UK co-productions, this film is somewhat unique in that it seems to be a completely British giallo. We're definitely in giallo territory here: There's a vicious rapist-murderer on the loose at a girl's school. There are two witnesses to the murder--one who can't quite remember what she saw (a familiar plot-line in the Italian films)and a previous rape victim who is too traumatized to speak. The lead is Suzy Kendall, who two years earlier had starred in Dario Argento's seminal giallo "The Bird with Crystal Plumage." It's definitely a very British film, however. The cinematography is staid and workman-like compared to the more garish and stylistic Italian films. The plot is fairly linear and logical, at least until the end when the murderer-rapist goes to laughably ridiculous lengths to stop a psychiatrist from giving sodium pentathlon to the traumatized victim to help her recover her memory.It's not surprising given the famed British aversion to violence (in movies that is)that most of the violence here takes place off-screen. Still it is pretty nasty violence, especially considering the rape angle and the age and gender of the victims. (It's interesting that these kinds of movies never take place at a MEN'S college or in an old age home). The sex and nudity is also pretty non-existent, but it doesn't exactly seem wholesome either the way they have cast sexy twenty year olds as fifteen year olds and dressed them in mini-skirts short enough to get any real schoolgirl expelled. The most lurid scene involves the headmistress's lecherous husband and a student librarian on a ladder. I don't know if it makes it more or less perverse that the "student" is played by Janet Lynn, a British sex star of the period (thus the obvious pseudonym)who had been featured the year before in Pete Walker's naked sex romp "Cool It, Carol". The only really recognizable star though, besides Suzy Kendall, is a young Leslie-Anne Down as the traumatized rape victim. (Despite what an earlier reviewer said, Jenny Agutter is NOT in this movie).Still if you can get around the leering British hypocrisy, the relative lack of sex and violence, and the fairly low-wattage of the star power, this is actually a pretty entertaining little film, and, if nothing else, an interesting one.