Another ‘Teachers Folly’

‘Teachers Folly’ is a DVD “From the BFI Archive Classics Collection” that was copyright by “Roue Distribution” in 2006.  It is not currently available from the Roue website (http://www.roue.com/) and I am not aware of any other source. 

The first spanking videos that I ever bought were two VHS tapes from Moonglow.  Each tape had a handwritten label that identified the three movies on the tape by their catalogue number.  One of the movies was ‘Teacher’s Folly’ (C08).  I picked that movie from the still photos on the Moonglow website and I wasn’t disappointed; it remains one of my favorites.  I was browsing through a used DVD site a few months ago when I found a listing for ‘Teachers Folly’ but I was quite surprised to find that I didn’t recognize any of the photos on the cover.  

This ‘Teachers Folly’ is a 55-minute movie that is described as being “From the BFI Archives Classics Collection”.  I have seen a ‘BFI’ bug on a number of videos on sites around the web before but I don’t know anything about the company beyond that.  I haven’t been able to discover anything else about the original producer of this movie.

Ivor Goldblatt, the founder of Red Stripe, plays the Teacher but this movie doesn’t appear in the Red Stripe catalogue so I suspect it was made before Red Stripe was founded.  The fine print on the back of the cover mentions “Roue Distribution” and says that the DVD is “Not for sale in the UK”.  It also gives a copyright date of 2006 but I presume that is for the DVD rather than the original video which looks more like a mid-to-late eighties VHS tape.

The movie begins with the Ivor, the Teacher, searching for two girls who are missing from a class nature walk.  He eventually finds them smoking in the woods and has them spank each other, a rather disappointing scene.  Later, they report to his office where the real punishment begins.  The story takes the usual route through hand spankings, followed by a tawse, a leather paddle, a wooden paddle and finally the cane.  The punishments are unremarkable and they are accompanied by tediously repetitive dialogue.

It isn’t easy to bore me with a movie about two young women being strapped, paddled and caned but this movie managed to do just that.  It is slow, repetitive and talky.  The camera work is poor and there are long sequences that consist of nothing but a close up of one of the women’s backsides.  That made it very hard to find screencaps to illustrate this review because many of them look the same.  The editing is poor and a ‘cut’ is heard at several places in the movie; in other places the count in to the start of the action is also heard.  But the most serious problem is that it is a 40-minute story stretched out over a 55-minute movie.  I was seriously considering abandoning the movie about 10 minutes from the end.  An aggressive edit that cuts about 10 minutes might help the pacing but the weak story and the poor framing are beyond repair.  All things considered, this movie was a disappointment and it certainly isn’t one that I would recommend.

UPDATE:  I found out that this movie was released in the US by CalStar under the name 'Nothing but Trouble' (it's available through several VOD sites) but I still don't know the original producers.