Teenage Doll (1957) watch online HD

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.

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.

Reasonably fun, trashy melodrama from the redoubtable team of screenwriter Charles B. Griffith and producer / director Roger Corman. June Kenney, receiving an official "introducing" credit, is appealing as Barbara Bonney, an upper class kind of gal who believes that she's committed murder. A girl gang called The Black Widows spends the night relentlessly tracking her down, while she tries to make it to what she perceives as safety.

This amusing Corman quickie purports to be touching upon the "important" real life topic of juvenile delinquency, but in reality it's not really something to be taken all that seriously, despite that opening text. It *is* entertaining, and Corman keeps the pace reasonably taut so that the story clocks in at just around 68 minutes. It's got solid atmosphere, some humour, and a respectable rumble during the finale.

The pretty Ms. Kenney makes a noble effort at acting her heart out, particularly when she's required to recite her story in front of a crowd. John Brinkley makes the most of his role as confident, swaggering male gang leader Eddie Rand. There are solid actors in the supporting cast, consisting of Corman regulars like Barboura Morris, Richard Devon, Richard H. Cutting, Ed Nelson, Bruno VeSota, and Paul Bryar. But this little movie truly belongs to a memorable Fay Spain, as Black Widows leader "Hel". She sinks her teeth into her role and dialogue, and is the most entertaining person to watch here.

Far from Cormans' best, but it does just fine for a nights' viewing.

Six out of 10.

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.