An early effort by Beverly and Ferd Sebastian, The Single Girls (also known by alternate titles Bloody Friday and Private School) occupies a fascinating transitional space in exploitation movies. While the sexual content itself tends to lean surprisingly chaste for its premise, the film compensates with a genuinely compelling concept that bridges the gap between the free-love exploitation cinema of the late ’60s and the burgeoning body-count craze of the late ’70s and early ’80s.
Its Wikipedia page famously captures its tonal whiplash with a TV Guide-style write-up: “A group of men and women travel to a Caribbean resort to discover themselves sexually, but unfortunately one of them has also discovered that they like to murder people, too.”
Essentially a nascent slasher film wrapped in early-1970s swinging culture, the narrative follows a planeload of singles heading to an island resort for a weekend of hedonism. When they aren’t busy balling or participating in dark room milling—a surreal exercise where everyone gropes everyone else in pitch darkness, erasing all identities—a razor-wielding killer begins picking them off one by one.
The Single Girls holds a vital place in exploitation lore: it served as the introduction between Claudia Jennings and The Sebastians, which ultimately paved the way for the swamp-action classic ‘Gator Bait.
