"Girl Gang" (1954). Movies come in four species. First of all, there is the class "A" movie, the major attraction at a cinema, made on a large budget with well-known stars and popular supporting actors. Then there is a "B" movie, made on a considerably less budget, but suitable for playing at cinemas during the first half of the program. All us oldies know that an "A" movie is the major attraction, and the "B" is the supporting feature that you can often come late for, and not usually miss anything of importance or something that was actually vastly entertaining. There was also the "C" movie for the super cheap, and the "D" movie for the made-on-a-shoe-string. "Girl Gang" is a "D" movie, but despite its small budget, it's a surprisingly entertaining one with its bevy of sleazy if sexy sluts, headed by Joanne "Girl in a Bathtub" Arnold in her only starring role, and Mary Lou O'Connor in her only movie appearance.

****SPOILERS**** Movie about juvenile delinquency in the mid 1950's USA with a gang of teenage girls and their boy hangers ons, for drugs sex and party going, working for this sleazy drug pusher Joe who uses them to steal cars and blackmail, by screaming rape, their male victims. It's Joe's #1 squeeze June a drug addicted hooker who together with disbarred doctor, for preforming abortions on the side, Doc Bedford who run the operation luring clueless teenager into their gang and corrupting them with both drug & sex.Joe overplays his hand by staging a gas station robbery that goes bad with two of his main players or robbers Bill & Wander ending up being gun down by the gas station attendant after he himself was shot down by them. With Wanda barley hanging on to life she's rushed to Joe's hideout where Doc Bedford is ordered to preform a life saving operation on her without an antistatic. Being barley sober, after taking a few shots of whiskey, to get the job done he screws up big time letting Wanda die on the operating or better kitchen table after going into shock due to loss of blood. That's just as the police storm the place busting Joe & June with Doc Bedford taking to flight.***SPOILERS*** Doc Bedford's attempt to escape the long, in this case short, arm of the law ended up in disaster for the old guy. Shot in the back while fleeing the police, despite being unarmed, the Doc ends up fatally wounded in a drainage ditch and dies before medical help can arrive. As for Joe & June their facing long hard time behind bars for what they did as well as reprisals from their fellow convicts who in many case were, in being addicted on drugs, victims of theirs. P.S "Girl Gang" was released as a double feather with the Ed Wood classic "The Violent Years" that covered much of the same material, juvenile delinquency, that it did.

A study in drug abuse like Reefer Madness, Girl Gang emphasizes the sleazy aspects associated with like-minded juveniles who find themselves corrupted by marijuana, and Heroin and delivers a mish mash of gratuitous exploitation.In an isolated apartment on the wrong side of the tracks June (Joanne Arnold) hangs out with her friends who come there to buy "weed" cigarettes, marijuana, from Joe (Timothy Farrell) who runs a business of selling Heroin to school kids and getting them addicted so they will pull crimes for him. Joe keeps a disbarred alcoholic physician Doc (Harry Keaton) on hand to help with assisting the school kids with clean injections. Joe secures a job for June with a local merchant in order to support her mounting heroin habit. June begins selling sexual favors, and when she is caught stealing money from a business Joe and Doc come forward to blackmail the man into silence. When Joe sends June and some others out to rob a local gas station, a girl gets shot and the police close in on the drug-infested apartment.It's too bad that, given the resources, the movie could not have been better. Judging by the mise-en-scene, the budget for the film looks to be about as good as it was for Detour nine years earlier. The major difference being that Detour has a strong central character and a strong story arc that carries the viewer from the opening through to the end, whereas Girl Gang never seems to focus on the right thing, first having a girl-gang robbery, which introduces us to drug dealer Joe, which leads us to June, but since June is our main character it only makes sense for us to learn about her and where she comes from and why she has ended up at Joe's apartment. Since we never know why June does what she does we have nothing to care about in the character and her downfall doesn't mean anything to us.Part of this is the charismatic screen persona of leads Tom Neal and Ann Savage in Detour. Not to take away from the relative merits of Joanne Arnold, and Timothy Farrell, but they were not A-listers nor were they strong actors, although Farrell did have a stronger presence than the eye-candy Arnold. To be honest Arnold was cast because they had a great body and this vehicle was to sell from the male gaze that was seeking cheap visual thrills from her presence on screen.Arnoldhad done the Playboy spread in 1954 and the producers must have thought they had a sure box-office with her in the movie. She's beautiful to look at but seeing her in motion in the movies it's clear she is not an actress. Her face never registers a glimmer of thought and the lack of her characters progression in the film makes it a flat gratuitous thing.

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!