Director Gordon Weisenborn.
Written by Robert Abel, Marjorie-Lee Joseph, and Herschell Gordon Lewis. Cinematography by Andrew M. Costikyan. Music by Martin Rubinstein.
Story
Chicago suburbs, somewhere in the neighborhood of Noirsville.
Jo Ann LeCompte, is Jean "GoGoGo" Norton. Jean is sexually active and looks older than she is. She can hang out in bars with the big girls. Frank Roche is the pedophile plainclothes cop Mack McKeen who has latched on to Jean.
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| Jo Ann LeCompte as Jean Norton |
Ray Gronwold is "Beard" the house beatnik / sketch artist for The Golden Goose Lounge a corner subterranean dive that advertises jam sessions and free food with the drinks. James Brooks is Tony Jackson, Jean's decoy date. Jean uses him and his car. a Tri-Power 1959 Pontiac Bonneville Convertible, to secretly meet up with her cop boyfriend Mack.
Maria Pavelle is Gloria a girl who has a crush on Tony. Karen Black in her film debut is Betty, Beard's model du jour. Robert Major is Shorty, and Ron Siden is Ray, both friends of Tony.
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| James Brooks as Tony and Maria Pavelle as Gloria |
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| Frank Roche is Mack McKeen |
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| Ray Gronwold is "Beard" |
It's another "girl in trouble" story. This film is a kind of cool way-back machine to the end of the Motion Picture Production Code. For one thing, I can't believe that anybody in the audience for this would remotely believe that Jane and Mack were just "going steady" and were not having sex already. Nobody over 15 would be that naive, I don't think. In the film it's just left open for interpretation with no explanation.
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| Tri-Power 1959 Pontiac Bonneville Convertible |
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The deal is Jean uses Tony and his car to meet Mack at Beards, that's their rendezvous. The M.O. is Tony picks Jean up at her house. Then she snuggles up against Tony as he drives to Luigi's "Gooda Food" restaurant a high school hangout where Tony gets out and then lets Jean borrow his Bonneville to drive to Beards .
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Do you think just making out would be enough? Here is where you can let the subtext run wild with your imagination. For me, they are probably friends with and occasional benefit thrown in (especially when she is mad at Mack, lol).
So this time, when Jane drives out to the Beard's, she finds the place empty, she's been stood up. Mack is out on a police case and when he tries to call the Beard's from the stationhouse she doesn't pick up. Jean has got a temper.
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Pissed off Mack calls The Golden Goose Lounge and asks for the Beard. The Beard does have talent and that attracts beautiful beat chicks who want him to do them in pencil on his sketchpad. He will even do nudes at his studio.
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When the Beard arrives back at the studio he tells Jane that she should take a powder because Mack is not gonna make it.
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We cut back to Luigi's Godda Food. Here first meet Gloria and Tony's friends, we kind of go into Scooby-Doo territory, minus Scooby. The gang is tight, they decide to go for a swim at a neighborhood pond. Gloria starts putting some moves on Tony finally getting him to go swimming.
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Bravo to these amateurs breaching the barriers of censorship. The sequence ends with Gloria and Tony embracing. Gloria goes home and Tony waits back at Luigi's to closing time.
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Gloria spots the car where Jean parked it, but there is no sign of Jean. Tony hop in and goes and tells Jean's folks that Jean is missing. So now Tony and the gang set out trying to figure out, like amateur detectives what happened to Jane.
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They get a lead on Beard at the Golden Goose Lounge and it starts to go Noirsville.
Noirsville
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There's a few sequences in the film with Tony and Gloria acting like amateur detectives that may remind you of Jeffrey Beaumont and Sandy Williams in David Lynch's Blue Velvet.
The plot is a bit ridiculous to swallow, but the Beat Speak dialog keeps things amusing, We even get a live music sequence with The Dodds performing Teen-Age Tiger. The title song "The Prime Time" was written by Harold Lawson and Sung by Buddy Frye.
The acting is adequate, what more can you ask for. It's sort of a message film warning young women about the "perils" of having too much of a good time with the wrong guys. It would be interesting if anybody knew the Chicago neighborhoods it was shot around since some of the street scenes are nicely archival capturing a time and place that's gone forever. It's worth a watch for Karen Black's debut film and a chuckle or two. 5.5-6 /10
Not great but entertaining (from IMDb)
lazarillo25 September 2009
Director Herschel Gordon Lewis is, of course, most famous for his "gore" movies like "Blood Feast", "2000 Maniacs", and "The Wizard of Gore". While I find these films pretty overrated, his stuff outside the "gore" genre like "Year of the Yahoo" or "She Devils on Wheels" is often downright unwatchable. So I was pleasantly surprised by this entertaining JD (juvenile delinquent) movie Lewis made very early in his career. Uber-voluptuous man-eater Virginia LeCompte plays perhaps the most unconvincing "seventeen year old" in the history of cinema. She convinces her parents to let her go out with nice guy "Tony", but then borrows his car to rendezvous with her real boyfriend, an older, corrupt police detective at the home of a beatnik paint/sex offender called "the Beard" who her cop beau is shaking down. The heroine gets herself in trouble after agreeing to pose nude for "the Beard", so for some reason her would-be boyfriend/sap "Tony", "Marie", a girl who is in love with him, and all their friends rush to the rescue of this obnoxious, ridiculously overaged "juvenile" before her "virginity" (yeah, right) is jeopardized.
The plot is ridiculous, but in a very entertaining way. Like a lot of 50's JD and beatnik movies this contains a lot of laughably ripe dialgue ("You're transmittin', but I'm not receivin'--you dig, daddy-o?"). There's also some entertaining rock songs by a live band including the theme song "The Prime Time" and "Teenage Tiger" ("She's a teenage tiger/Got the devil inside her"). There's a gratuitous flashback catfight scene between the heroine and another ridiculously mature-looking "teenage" girl (they hilariously roll around on the ground in poodle skirts clawing at each other's faces). Lewis does a good (i.e. competent) job directing this film, which very much anticipates thematically the later, more famous exploitation film "Scum of the Earth" he did with David Friedman and "Color Me Blood Red", one of his later gore films about another deranged--but much more murderous--painter.
Karen Black has an early don't-blink-or-you'll-miss-it part here. I don't know if I buy the story that she had nude scenes that were cut out. JD films of this era typically had a lot of exploitation elements, but they never had nudity, and this movie was made a year or two before Lewis and Friedman had gotten involved in any "nudie-cutie"-type stuff. Besides if you want to see Karen Black naked--or for that matter Karen Black in actual ROLE--you'd be much better advised to watch one of her later movies. This is not great, but it's pretty entertaining
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