Girl Gang/Delinquent Parents(1954)

Girl Gang

Girl Gang is so bad it’s good. The acting is sub-par, yes. The direction isn’t great. But the plot is actually pretty well thought out: Drug dealer uses a couple of his regulars to recruit young ‘greenhorns’ to his ‘candy’. Once they get hooked on weed, he moves them on to heroin and all of them eventually find that the heroin habit is more expensive, therefore they ‘owe’ the dealer more and more money. He then basically forces the girls into prostitution and ‘rape’ allegation shakedowns to get the money to pay him back. Time goes on and they get deeper in debt to him and get into worse and worse criminal activity to support their habit. This is certainly not a family night movie, what with all the sex and prostitution and blackmail. There is even a point where it shows step by step how to freebase heroin…you learn something new every day! If you have no sense of humour, or the slightest understanding of the time period in which this film was made, I don’t suggest you waste your time. On the other hand, if you love ‘Teenagers Going to Hell’ delinquency films of the fifties and sixties as much as I do, you’ll love this monstrosity! It’s a campy cheese-fest worthy of Mystery Science Theater 3000 that actually holds up decently on it’s own!

63 minutes, B&W, 1954

Delinquent Parents

The film begins with a woman getting pregnant and she is all alone. Following the adoption, two decades pass. Now, the birth mother is a family court judge and the child is a young adult who has no idea that she was adopted. Here is where it all gets a bit silly. When the girl learns that she was adopted, she goes from a sweet person to a a party-girl–and is well on the road to ruin! And, when she is brought before the judge, the nice judge learns that this is her own offspring! Can the judge somehow help this now hard-edged girl return to the straight and narrow? And, can she keep this dark secret?

62 minutes, B&W, 1938