Good start, but then it gets ruined

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

The Violent Years, one of my favorite Ed Wood films, takes on the toughest problem of the fifties: violent girl gangs! The gang, led by pretty Paula Prentiss, vandalizes, robs, assaults, and kills to get what they want. The dialogue is clunky, the plot ludicrous, the acting wooden, but it is hilarious. What deep, dark trauma caused Paula to take up a life of crime? Her parents don't spend time with her, buy her everything she wants, and write her blanks checks. Her life is truly a "living hell". All this leads Paula to become a vandalizing thief, a sexual predator, and a cold-blooded double killer. Go figure. What is this feminine fiend's explanation of her crimes? Not "They were scum and they deserved what they got.", not "I did it, and I'd do again", but the callous-yet-laughable "So what?". If you want a dark comedy with awkward characters, mixed messages, and a coma-inducing summary, watch this movie.

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.

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.

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. The four females are all miscast. They're too old to be teenagers. The main "girl", Paula, is 18 years old. But the role is given to an "actress" who looks more like she's in her thirties.The film's sets are cheap looking. Dialogue is horrible. There's no subtext at all. Characters say exactly what they're thinking, which renders a production reminiscent of a high school play. Overall acting is amateurish. None of these people have any talent. They mouth the words without conviction or credibility. B&W lighting is conventional but tolerable.With speech after speech about right and wrong, the worst element of the film is the ending, as a judge hits us over the head with a moralistic sledgehammer. 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: "... to kill for the love of killing, to kill for a thrill". The judge's sermon to the teenager goes on for several more minutes.But the judge isn't through yet. Later, he gives another sermon, this time to the parents: "No child is inherently bad. He's made what he is by his upbringing and his surrounding. Adults create the world children live in". (I didn't know that! hehehehe) "And in this process, parents play the key role. When children grow up among adults who refuse to recognize anything that is fine and good or worthy of respect, it's no wonder that ..." Yawn! The film "credits" show that the infamous Ed Wood, Jr. was the scriptwriter. No wonder the script is horrible.There are unintentionally funnier films out there than "The Violent Years". But the film still provides a good lesson for young filmmakers about what to do, and especially what not to do, when making a cheap movie.