Recently released on DVD: "St. Trinian's"

Grade: D

"Don’t you think I make a remarkable queen?" inquires Rupert Everett midway through St. Trinian’s, a stunningly witless revival of the infamous British film series about a girls’ boarding school. Playing both a headmistress and her crooked brother (roles originated by Alastair Sim in The Belles of St. Trinian’s in 1954), Everett spends half the movie in drag and most of it in groaning double entendres. Fortunately the astonishing lack of subtitles — I was mystified more than once — will ensure that American audiences are spared suffering along with comprehension.

Created by the cartoonist Ronald Searle, the St. Trinian’s pupils — gamblers, extortionists, delinquents and slatterns — are a far cry from Miss Jean Brodie’s "gerrrls." This time their antisocial gifts are harnessed to an unruly script involving an art gallery heist concocted to save their beloved school from foreclosure. While the girls nab a Vermeer, Everett’s headmistress — mastering teeth that would have defeated Seabiscuit — is attempting to nab Colin Firth’s minister of education, a squirmy flirtation enacted to the strains of Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing and the enthusiastic leg-humping of a terrier named Mr. Darcy.

Feebly directed by Oliver Parker and Barnaby Thompson, St. Trinian’s features young people making old jokes and talented performers making fools of themselves. At least the terrier’s career didn’t suffer: she was named best comedy canine at the 2008 Fido Awards.