A camp classic that remains heaps of fun to watch and is actually a well made film, as many efforts from director Jack Arnold were. Despite the “serious” narration at the end and some “serious” talks about the peril of drugs (which are never made fun of), you can’t help but feel the filmmakers had a tongue shoved in their cheek at times (I would love to read about the behind the scenes of this).
The two best things about the film are the dialogue (tonnes of slang, brilliantly beat-influenced – there is even a performance by an attractive female beat poet, and John Drew Barrymore does a slang version of the story of Columbus) and Mamie Van Doren as Russ Tamblyn’s horny large-breasted aunt.
The rest of the cast is fascinating: Barrymore (looking very much like a skinny version of his father) shows real talent in a sort of snarling sub-Elvis baddy performance, Diane Jurgens (sort of a poor man’s Anne Francis) scores strongly as a marijuana-addicted school girl (she has quite a hot scene where she tries to seduce Tamblyn), Jan Evans as the Eisenhower school teacher (who flirts with Tamblyn before its revealed he’s a cop – interesting sub-currents there), Jackie Coogan as the smart drug dealer (who won’t touch alcohol or drugs), a young Michael Landon as the leader of the decent kids, plus other sons of Hollywood royalty: Charles Chaplin Jnr and William Wellman Jnr.
It’s not a dumb movie either: although you may giggle at talk of the evils of marijuana, Tamblyn is also trying to stop the heroin trade; parents of school kids are shown to be ignorant of what their kids get up to.
There is a drag race, a performance from Jerry Lee Lewis, but the action highlight is an extremely well done climatic fight in a blacked out diner between Tamblyn and Coogan, with Landon and his pals helping out – they throw chairs and plates and tables, knives flash, guns fire, dancer Tamblyn leaps around athletically and it matched by a surprisingly nimble Coogan. It is a very well done sequence.
The skill of this is kind of ruined by then having a narrator talk about the school girl who has given up marijuana and “limits herself to normal cigarettes”.
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