Crew
Director/Screenplay/Producer – Joshua Kennedy, Inspired by The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1936) by H.P. Lovecraft, Music – Reber Clark, Stop-Motion Animation – Richard Svensson, Miniatures – Cassandra Guajardo, Makeup Effects – Danielle Garcia, Practical Creature Effects – Mitch Gonzales, Dean’s Mask – Immortal Masks. Production Company – Gooey Film Productions.
Cast
Hilda Sofia Bautista (Roberta Olmstead), Stefanie Jo Saenz (Suzi Banion), Jonathan Tamez (Andrew Tilton), Mitzi Venus (Lori Marsh), Cassandra Garcia (Gwen Mayfield), Joshua Kennedy (Barnabas Marsh), Dahlia Guzman (The Lunch Lady), Julian Flores (Joe Sargent), Bryan Martinez (Zadok Allen), Jairus Esparza (Casey)
Plot
Roberta Olmstead arrives to sign into the Innsmouth School for Girls as a pupil. She soon finds the school to be a sinister place. A teacher has gone missing. Around the nearby town, people are mutating and developing fish-like features.
H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) was an author writing in the 1920s and 30s who created a fascinating body of work that broods with a sense of cosmic horror. His stories centre around scientists uncovering forbidden knowledge, elder gods slumbering and awaiting to be released, ancient prehistoric races emerging and the like. There have been numerous adaptations of Lovecraft on film – see Lovecraftian Films and bottom of the page for a more detailed listing. The 2000s/2010s brought a number of creative offerings from enthusiasts and fans. In the 2020s, these have started to be made on cheaper budgets or where Lovecraft has been used a brand name often plastered above the title of a work that has little or no connection to his works.
The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1936) is one of Lovecraft’s more well-known stories. In the story, narrator Robert Olmstead discovers the Massachusetts fishing town of Innsmouth and its strange inhabitants who have been born as fish hybrids due to the locals conducting a deal with the Deep Ones for better fishing hauls. The Shadow Over Innsmouth had previously been adapted to film as part of Stuart Gordon’s Dagon (2001) and loosely formed the basis of the low-budget H.P. Lovecraft’s The Deep Ones (2020).
The Innsmouth School for Girls comes from Joshua Kennedy who has made a number of other low-budget genre films with the likes of Slave Girls on the Moon (2014), Dracula A.D. 2015 (2015), The Vesuvius Experiment (2015), The Night of Medusa (2016), The Alpha Omega Man (2017), Theseus and the Minotaur (2017), House of the Gorgon (2019), Cowgirls vs Pterodactyls (2021), Saturnalia: Cave-Girl from Outer Space (2022) and Mantopus (2025).
The title The Innsmouth School for Girls seems to be conceived as some kind of weird mash-up of Lovecraft’s story and a girl’s boarding film a la the St Trinan’s films. There is an odd fascination to the film. Hilda Sofia Bautista turns up as a new pupil at the school. The principal (played by Joshua Kennedy with his masked face mostly seen in shadow) and the lunch lady both look like fish mutations. One of the girls starts to mutate during the course of the story, while a missing teacher turns up dead on the beach, no explanation why but seemingly gored by fish creatures.
The weird thing about The Innsmouth School for Girls is that there is never any explanation offered for the fish mutations. The only explanation you can assume is by reference to the actual H.P. Lovecraft story that gives the backhistory about the townspeople and their deals with the non-human dwellers of the deep, but none of that appears in the film. There are one or two characters from the story who appear – Roberta Olmstead (getting a gender swap over Lovecraft’s narrator Robert Olmstead), Barnabas/Obed Marsh and Zadok Allen. The film’s story is a rather shapeless affair where assorted sinister things happen but none that ever moves the plot forward or ever resolve anything that happens. The film reaches an abrupt ending where the school is seen being engulfed in silhouettes of tentacles.
For some strange reason, everybody in the cast and in an acting role appears to be Latino (at least going by the surnames). I assumed this was because Joshua Kennedy had gotten some deal to shoot on the cheap south of the border but a look at the credits reveals that the film was shot at South Padre Island in Texas and at Brey Studios, Texas. The other curiosity is that Kennedy names characters after heroines in other genre films – there is a Susi Banion, who was the character played by Jessica Harper in Suspiria (1977), while the teacher Gwen Mayfield was a teacher character in Hammer’s The Witches (1966).
Trailer here