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Truly Dreadful Film

Good movie but grossly overrated

A different way of telling a story

The acting in this movie is really good.

The Violent Years (1956) *** (out of 4) As our film opens, a judge is putting down a couple parents for their lack of skills when it came to raising their child. When then flashback to what led to these events and we're introduced to four females who are on a crime spree.Please don't let my three star rating fool you. THE VIOLENT YEARS is not a good movie. It's poorly acted, poorly directed, it was written rather poorly and on every technical level it is pretty bad. With that said, if you are a fan of bad movies then there's so much good stuff here that you'll certainly have a great time with the movie. This certainly fits the term "so bad it's good." In case you're not aware, Edward D. Wood, Jr. wrote the screenplay to this film so there's the outrageous, silly and at times pathetic dialogue that his fans have come to love. There are some really silly lines throughout the short running time so that's one fun bit. Another fun thing is just how silly the entire story was and especially these four girls trying to act tough. The poor acting just doesn't make it that believable so you'll be laughing at how "tough" they are and especially during one sequence where they rape a man (off screen of course).If you're familiar with the exploitation movies from the 1930s and 40s you'lll be somewhat shocked that the stories weren't updated in films like this. No, it's the basic "blame the parents" routine and it's rather funny that after a couple decades people were still pointing their fingers at the parents and trying to play the criminals up as victims. Either way, THE VIOLENT YEARS is a really bad movie that manages to be a lot of fun as long as you know what you're getting.

Never let it be said that Ed Wood was afraid to tackle some burning social issues and he does so again here with his usual skill. The Violent Years talks about female delinquency as wealthy, but bored Jean Moorhead gathers around her some followers and they form a girl gang. These chicks are out for action and with them being masked, the law thinks that it's after your typical male holdup gang as the girls start going through all the local filling stations.But these brazen harlots don't stop there. Unmasked they terrorize couples in a frequented lover's lane and tie up the women and then force men to their sexual wills. I don't know about you, but that's normally the kind of thing that is not best done under pressure at the point of a gun. In the end Moorhead is pregnant and commits murder and the wages of sin are exacted by the long arm of the law in the person of noted character actor I. Stanford Jolley who looks like he's needing some laxative as he intones the sentence and his views on parents who do not give good supervision and values to their kids. Poor Jolley who is the only person in this cast who has a decent resume probably fired his agent after he signed him up for this.Ed Wood, they'll never be another like you.

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...

The 1950s were awash with movies warning about the dangers of spoiled teenagers becoming juvenile delinquents and wreaking havoc on society. Although they inherently verged on exploitation of the audience's desire to see girls being bad, they were supposedly serious and undoubtedly did reflect real concerns people had, however muddled their transition to the conventions of 1950s film-making was."The Violent Years" shows one of the worst examples of the trend. Here, we see lower-class male criminals (what people really feared) represented as upper-class females on screen, creating an absurd and utterly implausible plot. The delinquent teenager movies of the 1950s always played on the fear that one small mistake, one step away from conformity, would lock a youth into an inescapable path toward total moral ruin and life in prison. The motivation for this belief was undoubtedly fear of communism in the 1950s, with the idea being that if we veered away from being good Americans we'd lose the cold war, but "The Violent Years" makes the ludicrous connection much more blatantly than any other film I've seen. The film inadvertently shows how silly a lot of the fears of communist plots were: the viewer is asked to take seriously the idea that international communism is hiring upper class schoolgirls to break into their classrooms and destroy American flags."The Violent Years" is riddled with implausible characters and situations, broken only by a monumentally boring, laughably moralistic speech by the judge about how following the 10 Commandments will solve everything.If you want to watch a genuinely good 1950s juvenile delinquent moral panic movie, check out "Caged" (1950). If you want a laugh, try "The Violent Years", but make sure it's the MST3K version, otherwise you'll probably be bored to tears.