The Violent Years

Plot synopsis:
The story starts off with 4 girls dressed as boys robbing a gas station. They nearly kill the attendant by bashing him in the head with a gun. Later we find out these are really 4 bad high school girls going on robbery sprees in surrounding towns. The gang is lead by Paula (Jean Moorhead), who takes her 3 accomplices on their crime sprees mainly for kicks.Along with robbing gas stations, the girls end up robbing a young couple in Lover's Lane. They tie up the
woman, and take her boyfriend into the woods where they gang rape him (off screen).Paula's father is also a member of the local newspaper, and has been working overtime covering the crime sprees that have been taking the town by storm. Knowing that he has no reason to suspect her, Paula goes to her father under the guise of finding out more about the robberies. Her father explains that local service stations will have an officer in disguise on duty to deter future robberies.With this information, Paula tells her friends that they will be stopping the gas station robberies for now, and go to see a woman named Sheila (Lee Constant). Sheila has been purchasing the items that Paula and her associates have been acquiring, though she and Paula come to heads pretty quickly over how much the ill-gotten loot is worth.When Paula explains that the money really means nothing to her (having plenty at home), Sheila explains that she has some associates who would pay good money if she and her friends would wreck some schools.On the night of Paula's birthday, just like the ones before, her parents are both out. Paula is having a pajama party, though unlike the 'no boys allowed' rule that she told her mother about, her friends have invited along some uncouth boys in their early 20's, and some alcohol is also present.One of her father's co-workers stops by with her father's gift: a new watch. Paula claims she knows this without opening the box, because her parents have been getting her the same birthday gifts every year for quite some time. Along with a new watch, Paula's Mom always trades in her new car from last year for a new one this year.After the co-worker gets in a scuffle with one of the young men at the party, he leaves but cautions Paula to watch out for the company she keeps. Naturally, Paula just dismisses this. Once the co-worker leaves, Paula tells teh guys to leave.Arriving at the local high school, the 4 girls set about to wreck one of the rooms. However, the noise from their vandalism catches the attention of a night watchmen, who radios the police.The girls get into a firefight, in which two of them are killed, and Paula and another girl escape to Sheila's.Paula demands payment for what they did, but Sheila refuses, claiming she'll call the Police. Paula then kills Sheila, and the remaining two girls in the group check Sheila's for new clothing. After leaving the house, the two are spotted by a Police car, and take off. Paula's driving causes her to crash into a store window, killing the last of her classmates.After she has recovered, Paula is put on trial, and sentenced to life in prison. It is also revealed that due to her acts with the young man in Lover's Lane, that she is now pregnant. It is after this that her parents blame themselves for their negligent acts that led to their daughter's crime spree and pregnancy.Eventually, Paula gives birth to a baby girl, but dies from the birth process. Her parents lobby to raise the child, but the judge denies their request, stating that the baby will instead be placed in foster care for a more worthy family to raise the baby girl.

Tags: murder

Review:
Wood, Jr. I for one definitely intend to give a great deal of thought to the problem of bad girls in tight sweaters.10 stars...or zero stars...?
Bad dialogue, bad editing and ham acting plague "The Violent Years" as much as any other Ed Wood production."The Violent Years" follows the exploits of a gang of four school girls led by the daughter of the local newspaper publisher.
Along the way we get to see hilariously bad shoot out and crash scenes, an even more hilarious scene where the girls "rape" a man they discover making out with his girlfriend at the local lover's lane, and arguably the most hilarious monologue by a judge in film history.The aspect of an Ed Wood written film that provides me with the most amusement is the dialogue.
No judge would write a decision in a court case like the one we hear in "The Violent Years", except if he were at least as drunk as Ed Wood was when he wrote it.
However, if you're looking for an exercise in film making ineptitude for laughs, then "The Violent Years" is your movie..
Ed Wood, purveyor of class and dignity with a veneer of exploitation, gives us a great story about the consequences of parental neglect, albeit wrapped in nice, tight sweaters.The movie deals with a newspaperman's daughter (who looks about the same age as her parents) who has become a wild child because her father is too busy at work to notice that he keeps giving her the same birthday present every year.
So, left to her own devices, she has a gang of other females in need of thrills who rob gas stations and rape young men.While this tragedy is at times overly done, the point is still well made that parents need to be involved in their children's lives.
They rob gas stations, rape guys (!!!) and kill a policeman.All the "teenagers" in this film are easily in their late 20s/early 30s, the acting is all horrible and the script has every cliche imaginable with hilarious dialogue--it comes as no surprise that it was written by the immortal Ed Wood Jr.!Worth seeing for laughs.
As the judge is talking, the mother begins to think back about recent events and wonder if she DID have anything to do with her daughter becoming a menace to society.This daughter turns out to be like a Jekyll and Hyde sort of person--acting sweet in front of Mom and being an evil thrill-seeking idiot outside the home.
Regardless, the bad acting and silly script is very watchable in a salacious and laughable sort of way--particularly if you enjoy laughing at such films as REEFER MADNESS, SEX MADNESS or HIGH SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL.
In what is yet another bad juvenile delinquent movie from the moralistic 1950s, four "teenage" girls rob a gas station, erase a classroom chalkboard, and do other vile things.
He starts out by blasting a teenager: "...this thrill seeking became the one great thing in your life, piling one thrill on another until, with ever increasing intensity, you became much like the drug addict, with his continual increases of dosage ..." As the actor playing the judge continually looks down at a paper, which is probably the film's script, he slogs on: "...
In _The Violent Years_, Ed addresses parental neglect and small-town boredom as the motivations behind a girl-gang's reign of terror.
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.
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).
Proving Ed Wood can write just as well as he can direct, his script The Violent Years is brought to life by another director, and the result is still not good.
Like the later A Clockwork Orange, this has a gang of four teens robbing and raping- intriguingly, these four are all girls, which makes it harder to sympathize for the man who is raped- this is more male fantasy than horror.The film starts with the girl's parents up in front of a judge, who speaks about how hard it is to try a good friend.
The worst the woman who gives the gang its jobs can call the girls is "jerks." Of course, it all ends with more "If only I had..." mourning from the parents, reflecting a morality play with all the subtlety of being hit over the head with a hammer..
The Violent Years talks about female delinquency as wealthy, but bored Jean Moorhead gathers around her some followers and they form a girl gang.
She and her friends turn to crime by dressing up like men, holding up gas stations, raping young men at gunpoint, and having make out parties when her parents are away.
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.
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..
Another Ed Wood movie this has some bad acting and is not as much fun as Glen or Glenda or Plan 9 but it is quite a good film it reminded me of Honest with the All Saints in but that is much worse the version i got has a introduction by mamee van doren the movie its self is about 4 girls who party rob pretty boys and make a young girl take all her clothes off it is not a violent movie a 5 year old could watch this, Ed does not appear i think he just wrote it worth getting if you like Ed Wood and can find a copy.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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 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.
The viewer can decide what sort of leauge it is.First things first,some reviews have given the impression that the bad girls/innocent boy scene is more graphic than what it is.It's a scene that's more like 50% visual-50% imagination.The newspaper in the film states that the young man was attacked,it doesn't use the r word.Some reviewers are stating an act happened that the law says is not possible.At least that was the law when I was an adolescent more than 40 years ago and spent time researching important information like that,I'm still trying to figure it out.
Knowing that Ed Wood is behind this movie can make the tough storyline easier to watch.The finger pointing at the parents may be hard for some to take.There are many parents breaking butt in life to provide for family and instilling religious values in them but they mess-up anyway(the family not the parents).Making the parents look bad in this movie may be touching a sore area for some persons.One comment that the judge lost interest in his own speech half way through it was very funny,I remember seeing the top of the judge's head and wondering if he was reading the script or falling asleep.Showing them off sweaters are popular in this movie even the older Sheila(Lee Constant)comes out with in-your-face lookers too.Being an Ed Wood movie though Sheila could be a cross-dresser..
Four teen girls-- going on thirty-- play desperadoes while sticking up couples on public highways, raping boys, getting into bloodless shootouts, and generally acting like refinement school flunk-outs.
Story is about a seemingly "good girl" named Paula Parkins (Jean Moorhead) who has nice parents and does well at school but the truth of the matter is that she's involved in an all girl teen gang that robs gas stations and assaults innocent couples necking at lovers lane.*****SPOILER ALERT***** Paula along with Georgia (Theresa Hancock), Geraldine (Joanne Cangi), and Phyllis (Gloria Farr) commit these crimes and sell their loot to an older dame named Sheila (Lee Constant) who has connections(!) but the truth is that Paula enjoys her bad behavior for the thrill of it.
Stanford Jolley) decides that they have proved themselves to be bad parents and the child will become a ward of the state.This small "B" film was directed by William Morgan who was a very good film editor (Song of the South, Tarantula) but as a director he had modest success and I guess the best thing you can say about his talent in this field is that he was capable.
Ed Wood wrote the script and while this may be thought of as one of his better efforts there are still enough funny lines to keep your expectations up like the detective who barks out "They're not kids, they're morons" but the most monotonous speech comes at the end of the film with the judge.
Four teenage girls, who are well into their twenties, disguise themselves as boys (they wear bandannas) and "run rampage" through the city by pushing their sexual advances on a weaselly boy on Lovers' Lane and hitting a gas station employee with a handgun, not killing him of course, but, as one policeman remarks, "Not for lack of trying."After enduring a friend of her father's who shows up at their slumber party, trying to hold a conversation with the "teens" as they make out robotically, Paula leads the gang on their most heinous crime of all: breaking into their classroom in order to slightly disrupt the furniture and even erase the blackboard!
Let this be a lesson to us all."The Violent Years" isn't nearly as inept as "Plan 9 From Outer Space" or "Glen or Glenda?" (possibly because Ed Wood only wrote it, didn't direct it) but it's still terribly entertaining..
The Violent Years, one of my favorite Ed Wood films, takes on the toughest problem of the fifties: violent girl gangs!
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.
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.
The whole deal with the girls running round robbing, raping and eventually killing, its kind of like in A Clockwork Orange, except of course, its nothing like Kubricks masterpiece, but who'd expect that from Ed Wood?This is the second Ed Wood movie I've seen, Plan 9 of course being the first.
Written by Ed Wood of Plan 9 fame, this film centers on a group of girls who run around doing all sorts of criminal shenanigans.
Two of the gang die and no one cares, some other stuff happens, and end story.Truth is, the basic technical aspects are good, but they are drowned out by the bad acting, bad script, and bland feeling that makes it seem everyone had other things they'd rather be doing.Going forward, there are worse films from multiple stand points, but otherwise, this does just fall flat.
There are worse, but avoid this film unless you are drunk and like "bad girls".
The male victim 'sex attack' scene that everyone likes to talk about is boring and just ungodly stupid.This movie lacks all the charm of any of the other non-porno films related to Wood.
**SPOILERS** After a string of original and hard hitting cinematic classics about transvestites "Glen or Glenda" crime "Jail Bate" and nuclear destruction "Bride of the Monster" legendary bad movie director Ed Wood Jr decided to tackle one of the most pressing social problems that was traumatizing the country since the end of WWII juvenile delinquency.
Wood then came up with the unforgettable, to anyone who ever saw it, troubled youth film "The Violent Years".Paula is a nice girl who has everything in life that an 18 year old girl could want but the love of her parents Mr.
Getting in with the wrong crowd Paula becomes the head of a violent girl gang who, just for kicks, run up a string of 17 holdup of stores and gas stations with the last having the gas station attendant pistol whipped to the point that he was put into a week long coma.
It was tragic to find out that Paula turned out to be pregnant, by one of the many man that she made out with, at the time of her arrest and tragically died giving birth to a baby boy.Ed Wood Jr has Judge Clara give the grieving parents of Paula a lesson in child rearing by telling them, in the movies epilogue, that if they only took the time to show Paula that they loved her and attended to her growing up problems she wouldn't have ended up the way she did.
Judge Clara also had Paula's baby taken away from her parents to be given to a more sensitive and understanding couple to raise.A no holds bared and hard hitting movie about Americas troubled youth of the early 1950's, thats on par with the classic "Rebel Without a Cause" released a year earlier, that only the great Ed Wood Jr could come up with.The film shows, like in "Rebel", that when young people aren't given any love or direction from their parents and guardians they, like weeds in a garden, end up growing wild and destroy everything beautiful that they come in contact with including,like Paula and her girl gang members, themselves..
The movie is about 4 teenage (though they look 10-15 years older than that)girls led by Paula Parkins along with Georgia , Phyllis and Geraldine.
But Wood had a passion for film (and for cross dressing in angora sweaters) that pushed him to make movies in whatever way possible.And so it is that AGFA (American Genre Film Archive) is now releasing THE VIOLENT YEARS to blu-ray.
She leads a pack of degenerate girls into a gang doing things like robbing a gas station, pajama party orgies (if you can call them that) and eventually murder.
If it weren't for the bad writing and terrible dialogue you might think this was one of those government films from the 50s warning of the dangers of girl gangs.
Instead it's just a low budget movie that was probably a filler at some point.Just to be clear Woods didn't direct this film.
Paula Parkins is the teenage daughter of wealthy parents whom don't seem to make time for her, so she looks for thrills as the leader of her all girl gang who steal, rob, and rape a young man ...From The Mind Of The Great Movie Maker Ed Wood (Writer Of This Movie, This Time He Was Not The Director) Comes The Story Of "Girls Gone Wild" (No Not That Girls Gone Wild) ...
The Acting Is About As Good As Any Association With An Ed Wood Movie Can Be Expected To Be ....
At one point,the girl gang robs a gas station.