User Reviews

TEENAGE DOLL is a bad film. If you are looking for good acting and a well written film, you can keep looking. However, because the film so often goes over the top and because it's a bit ridiculous, it's all very watchable. In other words, as an exposée on "youth running wild", it's actually quite funny.

The film begins with a girls' gang discovering one of their members dead next to a set of stairs. The Black Widows are sure that a local teen did this, as the dead girl and Barbara were enemies--Barbara MUST have done it. Much of the film consists of these crazy dames looking for the assumed culprit to teach her a lesson. And, to do so, they steal a gun and some cash (why they need the money, I have no idea). Amazingly, however, after a long and convoluted journey to the final showdown, Barbara turns herself in to the police AND the girls gang decides that they need to give up their vendetta and stop getting in trouble!!! Huh?!? For the entire film they talk of revenge and then at the end, it all just fizzles?!?! This is a major letdown and essentially you have a film about wild youth who really don't do anything bad...other than have bad manners! The message seems to be that "nice girls", like Barbara, should NOT have anything to do with "bad girls"--lest their lives be destroyed! While there is, of course, some truth to this, it was handled poorly and several of the ladies simply were poor actresses and the writing really was poor. The ending, in particular, was bad but other notable bad scenes were the guy who taunts Barbara near the end--what's up with that?! Overall, the film is pretty poor but also kind of funny in a kitschy way. In other words, you can laugh at how silly and sanitized this film is, as for a girls gang, they are amazingly lame.

While there certainly are many bad films that I would count among the 10 worst of each year, and watching this film, I automatically assigned this to perhaps one of the worst of the decade. In fact, when it was over, I moved this from being one of the worst of the decade to perhaps one of the worst of all time. It is a film with no structure, hideously bad dialogue, a totally unbelievable plot and acting that looks like it came out of an instruction booklet after somebody poured out their alphabet soup. It is a story of a supposedly nice girl who gets involved with a gang of teenage thugs and ends a murderess. It is all about how the gang seeks revenge on her, yet hides from the police and the ultimate showdown between the law, her parents and this group of thugs that look about as teenaged as members of a senior citizens social group.

Then, what is with the hair style of the actress, Dorothy Neumann, playing the heroine's mother? It looks like something that Pippi Longstocking might have gotten out of a don't let this happen to you magazine, as if this was perhaps one of the original ideas of what Baby Jane Hudson might look like. The dialogue is so hideous that it isn't even laughable. I didn't laugh at the film even once. Characters have little to no motivation in anything they do, the plot jumps all over the place and ultimately this seems like something that was just rushed together so quickly that ultimately it doesn't even look like the same film if you manage to make it all the way through.

There is a sincere effort to make this a message film with an intelligence prologue at the very beginning where words flashing across the screen indicates that this is a film of it's time, of a subject that should be taken seriously and how it is not just one person's problem, but many people's problem. I will also give the film credit for having one of the best credit sequences I've ever seen but good credit and good intentions in a prologue do not make for a good movie. The plot and the structure have to flow together, the acting has to seem somewhat professional and the characters have to make you at least care about what happens to them. It is as if this teenage doll takes a place on some parallel universe, because as horrible as juvenile delinquency and teenage issues were in the 1950s I can't imagine it ever being anything like this. This is one of those movies that I would rank even below my one that I gave it if I had that option.

Dull and uneventful juvenile flick, with June Kenney spending most of the movie on the lam from a gang of girls. I spent most of the movie trying to keep awake.

The film does open with a bang, as we see a dead chick lying in an alley. The Black Widows, led by Fay Spain, arrive on the scene and realize the corpse is one of their members. They also find some evidence that incriminates Kenney.

From here, the film turns into a snoozer. The Widows and Kenney seem to just wander around, wasting my time. We get glimpses of the home lives of each of the Widows, which is supposed to make us understand why they are all screwed up. Instead, it made me want to throw up. One of the Widows has a kid sister whom she treats like crap. One who has an older sister who is about to sleep her way to a better job. Another has a father who is a cop (and she steals his gun). Kenney's parents are the most unbelievably matched pair since Fritz Feld and Virginia Christine - if you can imagine Feld as the mother.

Then there is another gang, this one composed of guys whose collective IQs would not break 10. I forgot the name of this group, because I was nodding off. So I'll just call them the Idiots. I lost track how many times these guys said "dumb broads," but I must confess, I've used a similar expression many times while driving.

Eventually it is revealed that Kenney and the dead chick had a fight, with the dead chick hurtling off a building. But by this time, you will wish everyone in the cast was dead. By the way, 30 minutes into the film, the dead chick is still lying in the alley. I hope she had a strong bladder.

Finally, there is a rumble at the Idiots hideout, between the Widows, the Tarantulas (another set of chicks), the Vandals (another set of guys), and the Knights of Columbus. This is fun for a few minutes, with the chicks clocking each other. Several guys leap through the air at their opponents, like Burt Reynolds used to do during the opening credits of "Dan August." The cops show up and almost everyone escapes. But Kenney and two of the Widows turn themselves in.

Kenney goes through various stages of hysterics, mostly unsuccessfully. She tries to convince her father that the blood on her dress is from a nosebleed. He notes that the blood stains could not be from drips, but must have occurred when someone bleeding was pressed against it. Hire this guy for "Forensic Files." Kenney's mother, played by the horrifying-looking Dorothy Neumann, looks like Judy Canova at 90 years old. Fay Spain is wasted as the leader of the Widows, as we don't even get a look at her cleavage. The Roger Corman Stock company all show up, with Richard Devon as a Detective, and Ed Nelson and Dick Cutting as cops. Bruno VeSota plays a fat drunk, which really stretches his acting abilities, as well as his pants.

This is a real cult film, no doubt about it. The sheer rawness of the characters and their environment stand in stark contrast to the wholesome image of American teen life in the Fifties,as portrayed in contemporary TV fare like Leave It To Beaver and Father Knows Best. The film is still toned down from the realism prevented by the production code, but it has a fierce, uncompromising quality about it that borders on real despair. Apparently, the semi-happy ending was tacked on at the last minute, and it weakens the film a little, but it remains a powerful story nonetheless. June Kenny is really good in the title role of the would-be delinquent who gets more than she bargained for. Some kind of special award should go to John Brinkley for his portrayal of Eddie, the leader of the Vandals gang. He has got to be the ultimate greaser of any Fifties movie, with a casual authenticity about him that is remarkable. Fay Spain is astonishing as Hel, the bad girl leader of the Black Widows gang. There is a jaded, seen too much too young quality about her that seems unforced, and she projects the dynamic quality one would expect to find in a tough , street smart girl leading a pack of delinquent girls. The parents of the June Kenny character are like something that wandered in from somewhere else entirely. The father, Damian O'Flynn, is a stiff, humorless patriarch given to lecturing, and the mother,played by Dorothy Neumann, is in a world all her own, with little girl braids and bows in her hair. There are many great walk-ons and cameos by Roger Corman favorites, including Bruno VeSota as the talkative drunk, and Richard Devon as the detective leading the hunt for the missing girl. The lighting and camera work depict an amazingly convincing night-world of deserted gas stations, lumber yards and auto junkyards, power stations and rundown houses. The movie has a strange, hard to define quality that is tied to these nighttime scenes of pursuit and flight. All in all, not a great film, but a fascinating one. It has a peculiar atmosphere all its own, with terrifically powerful music by Walter Greene adding to the tension created by the ominous settings. Anyone intrigued by Fifties delinquency movies should seek this out.