THE VIOLENT YEARS
A film review by Andrew Hicks
Copyright 1996 Andrew Hicks / Fatboy Productions
(1956) 0
"This is a story of violence, of violence born in the uncontrolled passions of adolescent youth and fostered by this generation of parents, those who, in their own smug little world of selfish interests and confused ideas of parental supervision, refuse to believe today's glaring headlines. But it _has_ happened. Only the people and places have been given other names." That's the narration that opens THE VIOLENT YEARS, a movie so bad it's hilarious. What else could you expect from a film scripted by Ed Wood himself?
As the narrator reads his Jack Webb-like intro, the four main characters of THE VIOLENT YEARS walk into frame one by one. They're four high school girls who have formed their own gang of violence and aren't too big on traditional authority. We can pretty much guess this as they walk in front of a blackboard reading "Good Citizenship, Self-Restraint, Politeness, Loyalty," and sneer defiantly. These girls have none of these things, especially their leader, Paula.
The movie begins with Paula's parents being chewed out by a courtroom judge for being so lax in raising the girl that she turned to violence. Flash back to the beginning of it all, when Paula tells her mother she wants to have a "heart-to-heart" talk with her and the mother replies, "What could be so important in your young life as to warrant my attention so drastically?" So Paula instead goes out with her friends and robs a gas station, the logical next step after your mom tells you she's too busy to talk.
Word of the robbery gets to Paula's dad, a newspaper editor. "These fool kids. When will they learn?" his star reporter asks him. "These aren't kids," he replies. "These are morons." But the joke's on you, dad. The reason Paula has turned to such crime is because you're busy with your newspaper, and the reason you're so busy with your newspaper these days is because of this femdom violence. Alanis Morissette has yet to dream of a situation that ironic.
The next night, the girls take their tyranny one step further and assault a couple making out in a car. They force the girl to take off her sweater and skirt and steal her jewelry. As for the "pretty" boy, "Maybe he's got more to offer than money." Another girl adds, "Under conventional circumstances, he could be very interesting." So they take him into the woods and, one by one, have their way with him. To a teenage boy, a more horrendous form of torture could only be imagined.
The next day is Paula's birthday, but neither of her parents can make it to the party. Better that they don't, though, because it turns out to be a four-on-four orgy of 50's proportions. However, even in its depiction of perversions, THE VIOLENT YEARS embodies each and every 50's cliche, from "You're a peach" to "Hi, gang." The girls are never believable as hoodlums and everyone else simply can't act. Mixed in with Wood's atrocious dialogue like "I'm not in it for the money. There's plenty of that at home... It's the thrill that gets me -- the thrill of the chase," it turns into one of the absolute worst movies of all time.
Finally comes the climax, as Paula and the gang are offered a job that will pay more money than all the gas station jobs combined, although we all know it isn't the money Paula is after. No, there's plenty of that at home. But getting paid by a bunch of Commies to trash the school will provide the thrill of a lifetime, as the girls overturn desks, write rebellious phrases on the chalkboard and throw globes into the wall. As bad luck would have it, though, the cops show up and plug one of the girls where it counts. "It ain't supposed to be this way," she wails before falling over dead.
Paula is finally captured after killing her fence and a cop, leading to the final court scene, in which the judge lets his mouth run wild. "You killed for the love of killing," he tells Paula. "A kill for a thrill." We get even more Poetry With Ed Wood when the parents finally realize the error of their ways and lament, "We've given Paula everything -- everything but real love. A new dress instead of a caress, a new car instead of a heart-to-heart talk."
Wood throws in a plot twist at the end involving Paula's illegitamate child that makes the movie even worse. As Paula's mother says, "It all seems like a bad dream." I'd have to agree with her on that one, and even more so with the judge's final speech about the youths of today (who are now over fifty) when he says, "Their callous attitude is summed up in two words: 'So what'." So what indeed.
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