An Exercise In Nonsense

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Teenage Gang Debs (1966) * 1/2 (out of 4)Terry (Diane Conti) is a troubled girl from Manhattan who moves over to Brooklyn and soon goes after the leader of a gang. She cuts his girlfriend off and begins having sex with him but she then seduces another member of the gang and talks him into killing the leader. This here sets off some events that shows how mean Terry is.TEENAGE GANG DEBS certainly doesn't look or feel as if it was made in 1966. I'm going to guess that this film was shot sometime during the 1950s when REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE broke loose and caused all sorts of low-budget rip-offs to follow. This film certainly doesn't look like anything from 1966 so I'm going to guess that's when the film finally got a theatrical release.With all of that said, this here is a pretty bland movie and there's really nothing here that makes this film stick out from the dozens of others that were released back in the day. Basically you've got the Diane character doing whatever it takes to be a "leader" and she doesn't care who she hurts or how much damage she causes. The film never bothers to tell us why she's like this but I doubt it would have mattered.The performances are all rather bland, although I will say that Conti was at least decent in the lead role. The soundtrack, editing and cinematography are all forgetable and there's really nothing here that you'd consider good. If you're a fan of this genre then you'll want to check it out but others should feel free to skip it.

TEENAGE GANG DEBS is another old indie thriller put out by Something Weird when they used to release double bills of rare old-time exploitation flicks. This one's an example of the juvenile delinquency drama, shot in New York in black and white and looking at the bad behaviour of gangs during the era. The main character is a ruthless female protagonist determined to get to the top in a bid for power and fortune. Expect cat fights, sex, lots of hanging around in seedy bars, and partying. It's very cheap and scuzzy looking, and the plot is a bit too unfocused for my liking.

Raven-tressed Diane Conti (who, like most of the cast, has at most only one or two other movie credits in IMDb) comes sashaying into the Brooklyn clubhouse of a clean-cut mostly Italian "gang" whose chief activities seem to be talking and dancing (if you call what Elaine on "Seinfeld" did "dancing"). She announces she's from Manhattan, which may as well be Mars for these local yokels. The "prez" of the club takes a shine to her, promptly dumps his current girlfriend and our Terry's off to the races, manipulating a subordinate clubster Nino into usurping the boss and then using Nino as a front for her own power grab. Eventually she "goes too far" and gets her comeuppance--from the other members' girlfriends, of course. That's pretty much it."Well then," you may be wondering, "should anything attract me to this opposed to umpteen others like it?" It depends how one reacts to Ms Conti, who carries it, and I for one liked her a lot. She "inhabits" the part very nicely, never seems to be capital-A Acting. Her line readings are neither zombie-like nor melodramatic. Her emotional displays are convincing, such as when she's lying in bed vowing that nobody's going to carve his initials into her, or at the end shrieking at the latter-day Furies to stay away from her. And yeah, she's pretty hot, especially considering that in the mid-1960's there seemed to be this cinematic conspiracy to make women as unattractive as possible (it took the "Hippie chicks" a few years later to break out of that mold). The other cast members pull their weight, and a few scenes actually aspire towards dramatic resonance, as when Nino (at the urging of Terry, of course) instigates a knife fight with a hapless member who just wants to quit and get married. ("It was never a big deal before Terry came along when somebody wanted to quit," a clubster complains. Really? Members could just stroll away taking all those secrets with them? Some bunch of desperadoes.) Some of the outdoors scenes are unfortunately hard to follow, being poorly lit and jumpily edited. There's a lot of "filler," mostly involving "dancing." White people trying to dance (especially back then) remind one of Samuel Johnson's notorious remark about female preachers: "It is like a dog walking on his hind legs: it is not done well, but one is surprised to see it done at all..." I'm white myself, just for the record. Outside the Philly Mummers parade, we should just leave it alone...

Surprisingly well directed considering its ephemeral trashcan image. I liked the photography of the fight scenes, almost worthy of Kurosawa. I liked the Jacobean amorality and black humour. And in its genre it was quite dramatic. No doubt hundreds of minor films like this are ignored by the critics and banned by the authorities, only to be resurrected on C4 Eurotrash-cum-Exploitica slots. Of course the nasty heroine had to have her come-uppance in the end, but there was enough action and atmosphere of a non-prurient satanic sex'n'violence to make the ending a pure palinode.