Bad girls are on the loose. Four female high school students are alleviating their boredom by turning to crime. During the evening hours, they rampage around town in a carefree way by robbing gas stations, vandalizing school property, and raping men. Paula, the leader of the gang, is given free reign by her wealthy parents, and she exploits investigative information given to her by her father, who is the local newspaper editor with an inside line on the actions taken by the police. This female crime wave escalates in an intense way when they engage in a fierce shootout with the police and kill an officer.
The 1956 film
noir crime thriller,
The Violent Years, was written by none other than the legendary Ed Wood (
Plan 9 from Outer Space), and his trademark ineptness at dialogue is all too evident, but the scrappy effort simply adds to this movie's retro charms. The four teenage girls are all played by women who are obviously in their 20s, and this aspect of the production also enhances its appeal. Jean Moorhead, who plays Paula, was a Playboy Playmate in 1955, and she also appeared in a few late 1950s sci-fi B-movies. This film, which rockets by with a 56-minute run time, opens with a spoken word narrative and a courtroom sequence before relaying the main story,
noir style, in flashback. An obnoxiously heavy-handed monologue by a court judge during the final minutes will elicit laughter from most present-day viewers, but, once again, it's just part of the overall offbeat awesomeness.
As I watched this movie for the first time tonight, I was all smiles when I recognized a particular line,
"You have had all that money can give you, but that wasn't enough. You became a thrill seeker...", from a song, “So What”, that appears on the 1990 album,
The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste, from the industrial band, Ministry. I used to listen to that Ministry album all of the time when it was released during my senior year of high school, and I have revisited it fairly often since then, so the sampled quote jumped out at me. Several subsequent lines from the film are also sampled in that song, and, in fact, the line,
“So what?”, appears a few times late in the film.
The Violent Years is a bad movie, even by the standards of the juvenile delinquent offshoot of the
noir genre during the 1950s, but it's insanely entertaining in a time capsule sense, and I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. The voiceover spoken word intro makes it clear that this story was directly inspired by real-life newspaper headlines, because this sort of thing was apparently occurring with increasing frequency during the 1950s and beyond. I, for one, am counting my lucky stars that I was never held at gunpoint in a “man attack” by four pretty women.
The 4K scan of
The Violent Years that appears on this AGFA Blu-ray looks and sounds great, especially when compared to the available YouTube showings of the film. The commentary track by Frank Henenlotter and an Ed Wood historian is truly fun-spirited.
I'm still making my way through the rest of the extras, and I'm planning to watch the bonus film,
Anatomy of a Psycho, tomorrow night.
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