Teenage Gang Debs (1966)

Strong and Moving!

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Teenage Gang Debs (1966) * 1/2 (out of 4)Terry (Diane Conti) is a troubled girl from Manhattan who moves over to Brooklyn and soon goes after the leader of a gang. She cuts his girlfriend off and begins having sex with him but she then seduces another member of the gang and talks him into killing the leader. This here sets off some events that shows how mean Terry is.TEENAGE GANG DEBS certainly doesn't look or feel as if it was made in 1966. I'm going to guess that this film was shot sometime during the 1950s when REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE broke loose and caused all sorts of low-budget rip-offs to follow. This film certainly doesn't look like anything from 1966 so I'm going to guess that's when the film finally got a theatrical release.With all of that said, this here is a pretty bland movie and there's really nothing here that makes this film stick out from the dozens of others that were released back in the day. Basically you've got the Diane character doing whatever it takes to be a "leader" and she doesn't care who she hurts or how much damage she causes. The film never bothers to tell us why she's like this but I doubt it would have mattered.The performances are all rather bland, although I will say that Conti was at least decent in the lead role. The soundtrack, editing and cinematography are all forgetable and there's really nothing here that you'd consider good. If you're a fan of this genre then you'll want to check it out but others should feel free to skip it.

TEENAGE GANG DEBS is another old indie thriller put out by Something Weird when they used to release double bills of rare old-time exploitation flicks. This one's an example of the juvenile delinquency drama, shot in New York in black and white and looking at the bad behaviour of gangs during the era. The main character is a ruthless female protagonist determined to get to the top in a bid for power and fortune. Expect cat fights, sex, lots of hanging around in seedy bars, and partying. It's very cheap and scuzzy looking, and the plot is a bit too unfocused for my liking.

Raven-tressed Diane Conti (who, like most of the cast, has at most only one or two other movie credits in IMDb) comes sashaying into the Brooklyn clubhouse of a clean-cut mostly Italian "gang" whose chief activities seem to be talking and dancing (if you call what Elaine on "Seinfeld" did "dancing"). She announces she's from Manhattan, which may as well be Mars for these local yokels. The "prez" of the club takes a shine to her, promptly dumps his current girlfriend and our Terry's off to the races, manipulating a subordinate clubster Nino into usurping the boss and then using Nino as a front for her own power grab. Eventually she "goes too far" and gets her comeuppance--from the other members' girlfriends, of course. That's pretty much it."Well then," you may be wondering, "should anything attract me to this opposed to umpteen others like it?" It depends how one reacts to Ms Conti, who carries it, and I for one liked her a lot. She "inhabits" the part very nicely, never seems to be capital-A Acting. Her line readings are neither zombie-like nor melodramatic. Her emotional displays are convincing, such as when she's lying in bed vowing that nobody's going to carve his initials into her, or at the end shrieking at the latter-day Furies to stay away from her. And yeah, she's pretty hot, especially considering that in the mid-1960's there seemed to be this cinematic conspiracy to make women as unattractive as possible (it took the "Hippie chicks" a few years later to break out of that mold). The other cast members pull their weight, and a few scenes actually aspire towards dramatic resonance, as when Nino (at the urging of Terry, of course) instigates a knife fight with a hapless member who just wants to quit and get married. ("It was never a big deal before Terry came along when somebody wanted to quit," a clubster complains. Really? Members could just stroll away taking all those secrets with them? Some bunch of desperadoes.) Some of the outdoors scenes are unfortunately hard to follow, being poorly lit and jumpily edited. There's a lot of "filler," mostly involving "dancing." White people trying to dance (especially back then) remind one of Samuel Johnson's notorious remark about female preachers: "It is like a dog walking on his hind legs: it is not done well, but one is surprised to see it done at all..." I'm white myself, just for the record. Outside the Philly Mummers parade, we should just leave it alone...

Let's face it. This movie sucks. It doesn't even fit in the "so bad it's good" category. Low low budget, horribly staged fight and rumble scenes-c'mon guys, somebody take a punch! This is another one of those movies where you can be shot or stabbed and there is never any blood. How this can be called exploitation is beyond me. Just because it's from the early 60's, is shot in black and white and has "teenage" in the title does not make it an undiscovered classic. Something Weird has so many better titles along this same ilk. Nothing happens in this film. The sex and violence and even the language are all rated G. Pass on this timekiller. Even the soundtrack music leaves much to be desired and you've heard it a million times. Every 60's porno loop lifted the same music and it was put to better use!