I'm very familiar with Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows, which is sort-of the sequel to this. I had it backwards, thinking that this was the sequel. This is nowhere near as much fun, mostly because it's so much more realistic.
Hayley Mills plays the poorly-behaving student, who tends to lead her friend into trouble with her pranks. The problem that the movie runs into is that these pranks aren't especially special. Most of the trouble she gets in is for run-of-the-mill bad behavior. Smoking in the bathroom, smoking in a cellar, leading to the fire department being called. The wackier things that they do are a little off. One of them involves putting bubble soap into the tea of the nuns, which somehow leads to a whole bunch of bubbles floating around the room. No mention that drinking that stuff would be kind of sickening. There's a prank that involves trying to make a cast of another girl's face, then being unable to remove the cast. But since we never learn what her plan was, it seems like a distraction.
All of this makes it hard to sympathize with the lead. It's also difficult to sympathize with the Mother Superior, since she tries to alternate between being mysterious and being angry. If anything, from a modern perspective, the nuns are trying to be strict, but they remain ignorant of how to actually shape the student behavior, other than just repeating what they want.
It doesn't sound like it, but I actually did like this movie. I didn't love it, but it was still pretty good.
The biggest weakness is that there isn't much of an overarching plot. I think the friendship between the two girls, as well as their relationship to the Mother Superior, is supposed to be the focus, but it doesn't have much material to go on.
Plus, it doesn't have an awesome song like Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows.
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