The Violent Years (1956)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

This clear "message" movie begins with a hep jazzy score and a blackboard with inspiring socially-concerned words written across it as lead actress Jean Moorland and other women enter and make dismissive gestures as to the value of the epithets.When the film shifts to a court room with character actor as Judge handing down a lesson sentence to the parents we know we're in that fuzzy land of Ed Wood whose flat-footed aesthetic has now become legend and imitated for its value in what it can say about its subject as well as what it says about the source of the story it tells.Rich kid Paula Parkins (Jean Moorhead) and her gang of tough high school women friends spend their days and nights committing crimes, and getting away with it because she uses her parents car and fences stolen goods though and underground source. When not stealing they terrorize the citizenry with extremes like raping young men, and indulge in heavy petting parties at their parents house. When a local closet communist hires the girls to vandalize a high school police are tipped off and guns are fired. Paula finds herself in jail, pregnant from a one-night stand and her parents are left with the blame.The film was a modest money maker on the B circuit and one can only owe this to the titillating title and all-women cast involved in dastardly deeds against society. This may have been the closest Ed Wood came to monetary success, having written the script for the film.Many of the subversive ideas and themes can be ascertained in how the lead women refer to each other with men's names, making their rape of a young man all the more subversive. Writer Ed Wood was no dummy when it came to reusing successful formats. He later retooled the screenplay for Fugitive Girls which morphed into Five Loose Women in 1974.

Great flick to watch with your friends and laugh at. The unintentionally hilarious dialogue is straight out of a Saturday Nite Live skit. When the parents talk, it's always stating the obvious...no subtlety here. At one point,the girl gang robs a gas station. They are dressed like teenage boys, but their eye liner and manicured eyebrows show above the scarf over their mouths. They run like girls and are the curviest guys you ever saw. Needless to say, they fool everyone. At one point, they take captive a thirty something couple making out on lover's lane (in the daylight). They tie the girl up and march the guy into the woods at gunpoint. They point a gun at him as the head bad girl approaches him and begins to take off her sweater. The headlines the next day says that the girl gang assaulted the poor man. Now isn't that every man's dream? To be sexually assaulted by four hot chicks???? Did he actually try to escape? Then there was the night time shootout from the second floor classroom. When the cops on the ground shot back, it was daylight. It was the living end, Daddy-o.

This mid-50s low budget juvenile delinquency-themed film is about the very improbable story of four rich, bored, beautiful teenage girls (they look like their actually pushing 30 though) who get their kicks by robbing gas stations, trashing schools, and attacking young people on lover's lane. The characters (especially that of Paula, their leader) are very unbelievable - the scripting is wooden and amateurishly acted, especially the hammy "he/she shot me!" scenes which must go down in cinematic history as the fakest ever to appear on film. The filmmaker simply wanted an excuse to film beautiful, busty girls wearing sweaters two sizes too small and put them in a contrived juvenile delinquency story. My score is 8 for the super-tight sweaters minus 3 for the silly death scenes and a minus 3 for the horrible dialog equals a 2. No wonder this was used by MST3K...

I saw this Ed Wood written film as an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Typical Ed Wood film, though it looks better than the other films that he not only wrote, but directed as well. This one is like a female, I Accuse My Parents, only in this one you are going to have a hard time trying to sympathize with the lead girl in this one, because while the boy in I Accuse My Parents is a dope, he is not trying to go out and intentionally hurt anyone, unlike the leader of the gang of girls in this one. The parents of this girl were not quite as negligent as his parents either as his mother was constantly getting drunk and stuff, while here their major crime is the father works a bit too much and the mother likes to do charities. Meanwhile, they shower her with gifts and money and don't question what she is doing at night. Of course a girl is going to go wild, that is what females do when they are teens. It does not matter what the parents did, even if they coddled her it would have made her rebel! Oh sorry, that was a bit of a rant, just comes from the experience of living with a sister that was crazy during her teen years I guess.The story has a group of girls performing various crimes throughout a small town. Robbing gas stations, trashing schools, attacking couples and raping young men. Wait, what? Yes, you heard me correctly, they are very bad girls. The leader, as I have stated is basically the daughter of every well off parents. She even uses her dad to help her with her crimes as the father is the head of a newspaper and is covering the crime spree so she gets information from him that he gets from the police. They have a chance at a big score that apparently involves trashing a school by doing very minimal vandalism and this somehow leads to a shootout with the police which leads to a very long winded courtroom session that features Judge Pad Film.As an episode of Mystery Science Theater, it is one I find very funny and one that kind of is one of the main reasons I prefer Mike Nelson as the host of the show to Joel Robinson. Do not get me wrong, I like both and it is not a huge gap or anything, it just seems I find that Mike hosted shows hit the ball out of the park more often. From the bumps which includes one of my favorite sketches of a radio station named Frank to the very funny riffs that litter the film. Joel did an Ed Wood film too, but it was not quite as good. I always feel the jokes come at you at a better pace with Mike than Joel, which is one of the reasons I lost excitement over the show's revival as Mike has nothing to do with it. I will probably give it a chance, but I just do not think the show will be as funny without him, because even when he was not the host, he was the head writer.So, the film is not good; however, what do you expect? It is an Ed Wood film. That being said, I say Ed Wood was a much better film maker than another Mystery Science Theater regular in Coleman Francis. Ed Wood's films looked cheap had some bad acting and were generally bad all around, but they at least had tangible plots for the most part and while they looked cheap they looked like films. Coleman Francis films were all over the place and at times resembled someone just recording random things! So, a not so good film that at least had a plot going for it and a great film for the gang to riff. Now, I should go before that judge comes to my house and starts telling me about how society and parents are why Ed Wood films exist.