Don Gregor is arrested by the police for carrying an unlicensed pistol. He is bailed out by his sister Marilyn & is warned by the cops to stay away from guns. What they don't know is that he has managed to get away with a robbery & already has another gun hidden in a book at the family home. Despite Marilyn's protestations, Don takes the revolver & joins his old mate, petty gangster Vic Brady, in robbing a theatre. The plan was to take the money & bail out fast, but the security guard (a retired cop) resists & a female witness stumbles onto the heist. Don is forced to kill the guard & Vic shoots the witness. But the witness survives & IDs Don & Vic as the robbers. Don, struggling with his conscience over the guard's death, visits his father (a famous plastic surgeon) & confesses to the killing. He then visits Vic, who kills him in order to escape the law. Realising that Don's father is a plastic surgeon, Vic abducts the doctor & forces him to change Vic's appearance so that he can beat the witness ID. But the doctor, discovering that his son is dead, decides to give the ruthless gangster an ironic punishment.Edward D. Wood Jr – most commonly known as Ed Wood – is considered to be the world's worst director of all time & creator of the much-respected schlock classic PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, a formidably bad alien invasion flick that became legendary for its sheer ineptitude. Jail Bait was one of Wood's early films & comes with script input from Alex Gordon, who would later become a producer at AIP.For the first hour or so, Jail Bait emerges as a pretty average crime flick, no more or less. It has a plot that is standard for the genre, although Gordon would ensure that most of the dialogue would not match the usual low standards of Wood's poor writing skills (although some of the dialogue would still sound a little cheesy). Future Hercules actor Steve Reeves appears as a cop (his voice is deep, not squeaky, in order to quash those old rumours) & future Plan 9 stars Lyle Talbot & Mona McKinnon make appearances here as well. The plot, with Clancy Malone's obsession with carrying guns in order to carry out small armed robberies, seems pretty average. Also of note is the fact that the film's low production values give rise to some pretty annoying blunders – the minstrel clip that appears halfway through the film is there just to pad out the running time & is rather pointless, while Hoyt Kurtain's droning guitar & piano score is incredibly annoying & proves to be somewhat of an irritation.But while the first hour seems fairly average, Jail Bait reaches a suitably ironic climax that I personally managed to predict about ten minutes in advance & found myself laughing my head off at the twist ending that has the doctor change Timothy Farrell's gangster's face to resemble his late son so that Farrell would inherit his cop killing rap (which was ultimately his fault anyway) & get the punishment he so rightly deserves. This ending, along with the throwaway shot of Dolores Fuller's sister being revealed to also carrying a gun in her purse (an instance of poetic irony) make what is essentially a mediocre crime thriller turn into a passably eccentric thriller.

This movie is a riot. I believe it is actually worse than Ed Wood's more famous classic "Plan 9 From Outer Space". This story is every bit as dumb as Plan 9 and the dialog is even worse - in fact it's a howl. I swear Ed Wood must have written this whole script in a day and never once looked back a second time at a line he had written. There are some really illogical parts to the plot here. 1. Why would the son of a famed plastic surgeon resort to being a stickup man when his wealthy father could give him anything he wanted in the whole world, easy as pie? 2. When the young man and his 'hardened criminal' pal are stealing the movie theater payroll (!) they get the night watchman to open the safe. Why on EARTH would a night watchman have the combination to the safe he is supposed to be guarding? What possible business could a night watchman have, opening a safe full of money he is guarding? It's ridiculous, but just another example of the depth of thought that went into this storyline. (When the young man and his criminal friend rob the theater, they relieve the night watchman of his holstered gun - and when they take it out, it looks like a little kid's tiny toy cap pistol, dwarfed against the holster. Hilarious.)3. At the end of the story the plastic surgeon grafts the face of his dead son onto the 'hardened criminal' so he will be arrested for murder. Other than that idiocy, amazingly the 'criminal' now has the height and build of the dead son! And everyone KNOWS that the face has been transplanted but no matter, that is the face of the guy who shot the watchman so the person who now HAS the face is the murderer! Ed Wood whipped these bizarre plot twists out left and right and seemed to think they were reasonable.4. The police detective asks the woman who works at the theater two or three times, is she SURE she saw Don Gregor actually shoot the night watchman, and she insists yes, she did. But she ran out of the room at least five seconds before the watchman was shot. There's no way she saw it happen!5. The watchman at the theater was a retired police officer who got 'bored' after he quit working so he took the job as the watchman. Yeah, that's a way to add some excitement to your life. Baby sit an empty building and a safe. Oh, and when he gets killed, even though he's just a night watchman now, it doesn't matter - the guys who killed him are COP killers.The musical background is also weird. The whole soundtrack consists of someone rapidly strumming a Flamenco guitar and someone playing random-yet-dramatic notes on a piano, no matter what is going on. The sets are stunningly cheap but the hardened criminal's girlfriend defends him to another woman by saying "Look around, does this stuff look cheap to you?" and the criminal himself points out how he has surrounded her with "all this luxury". The place looks just a cut or two above Ralph Kramden's apartment - totally cheap and spartan. Some luxury! And if I'm not mistaken, the tiny bungalow where the famous plastic surgeon lives is the same house Bela Lugosi walked out of in Plan 9, distraught over the death of his wife and "never to return." It's a pretty rinky-dink place for a famed plastic surgeon to live.Some great dialog lines from the movie: Marilyn Gregor: "You haven't failed, Dad!" Dr. Gregor: "Words, my daughter! Just words! The proof is in the FACT!"At the beginning of the payroll heist, with the watchman standing RIGHT IN FRONT OF the locked safe.... Watchman: "What safe? What combination?"Giving the police information of what she saw when the watchman was shot... Theater employee: "I'm afraid I wasn't very brave. I fainted early in the game."Sipping the drink his daughter made him.... Dr. Gregor: "Ahh. That's a good drink for a parched throat."Describing his phone call with the police... Dr. Gregor: "We had a long telephone conversation this afternoon, earlier in the day."Hoodlum Vic Brady bickering with his girlfriend: Brady: "He wants to give himself up!" Girlfriend "What?!" Brady: "What do I have to do, repeat myself all night? I said -" Girlfriend: "Yeah, yeah, I heard you. I heard you the first time." Brady: "Well then stop jibbering! I gotta think." Girlfriend: "What are you gonna do about it?" Brady: "Shut up!... Whaddya think it is I want to think about?"What else needs be said? It's a scream!

If you've ever wanted to discover why Ed Wood is notorious, this isn't the best film to begin with. Certainly, it is a good example of bad film making, not, though, one of Wood's masterpieces – no rubber monsters, no hubcap spaceships. This is a piece of Wood Realism, much like Sinister Urge.The plot is coherent though the script poor. Dr. Gregor lives in Southern California and is a 'world famous' plastic surgeon. Such a pursuit must have been far less lucrative in the fifties because he lives in a very modest suburban rancher with his two children, Marylin and Don, who both look well into their thirties. Although the good doctor would buy them anything they wanted – by taking out a second mortgage, perhaps – Don opts for a life of crime with thoroughly bad sort Vic Brady. Needless to say, difficulties arise and the doctor must employ his plastic surgery skills. How different the story might have been if Ed had written Gregor as a proctologist.All of this is badly acted out by a group of Wood regulars, such as Dolores Fuller and Don Nagel, enhanced by a few interesting additions. Old movie hand, Herbert Rawlinson, plays Gregor, his last role before dying of lung cancer, and he clearly gasps for air to get out his lines. Steve 'Hercules' Reeves has his first speaking role, yet not to waste him Ed has him take off his shirt – one for the ladies and the discerning gentlemen. Brady is played by dependable D-grade movie sleaze, and frequent Woodworker, Tim Farrell.If you are familiar with Ed's oeuvre or simply like bad films, Jail Bait is great. For a grasp of Ed's magnificence try Plan Nine or Night of the Ghouls first.Oh, and if you've ever wanted to discover how on earth Minstrel Shows fell out of popularity, watch the comic stylings of Cotton Watts and Chick, included in this film for no particular reason, and that should sate your curiosity. The most horrible thing I've seen in an Ed Wood film, which is really saying something.

This is Ed Wood's film noir. The jail bait of the title is a gun. Go figure. But this is a Wood film after all and these kinds of anomalies just happen. It is, after all, a movie populated by people living in houses with curtains for doors.The story is about a young guy who ends up in bad company and winds up killing a security guard in a heist. The police pursue him but he is killed by his evil partner. This bad dude subsequently forces the dead guy's father – a plastic surgeon – into giving him a new face, and hence different identity.Many of the cast from Wood's earlier Glen or Glenda return here. And like that movie the acting and dialogue is reassuringly atrocious. When Dolores Fuller and Theodora Thurman engage in a conversation towards the end of the film it's a bad acting master class; at moments like this Wood's movies create their own hyper-reality of the absurd, where almost anything ridiculous seems possible. The ending is a case in point. It's truly and utterly ridiculous. The doctor knows that his son is dead, so gives the bad guy his son's face. This is so that he will get arrested by the cops for the murder his son committed. But what makes the scene so insanely stupid is that everyone, including the cops, knows that the guy has had plastic surgery, therefore, his face is false! This kind of illogical plot-line is par for the course in the weird world of Ed Wood.Another notable aspect of Jail Bait is the soundtrack. Imagine a 50's crime thriller set to the music for a spaghetti western and you will be in the right ball park. The persistent strumming guitar is used everywhere irrespective of what is happening on screen. Another thing that seems to be used everywhere is the small brass plated picture that seems to adorn almost every room in the movie. A drinking game could be based around the appearances of this picture. It's hilariously omnipresent.Jail Bait is full of the kind of things that make Ed Wood movies fun. It might not be as enjoyable as the full of nonsense camp classic Plan 9 From Outer Space but it's still quite hilarious. Rotten production values and negligible talent behind and in front of the camera it may be but it's myriad of failures all add up to something entertaining. This is just what usually happens with Wood films for some reason. Go figure.