User Reviews

I had heard that Herk Harvey, director of the curious seminal 60s horror film "Carnival of Souls", had only done the one feature film, and had spent his career in film doing educational and promotional shorts, but this was the first time I had actually come across any of his work along these lines. Here he is working for Centron, a company responsible for a whole truck load of shorts made for classroom use on virtually every subject imaginable, from patriotism to tooth decay. Obviously, the subject this time around is juvenile delinquency, and frankly, it would take longer than the film's 10 minute running time to describe the curious goings on here. Broadly, without detailing things, the film attempts to put the shoe on the other foot as a high school gang member learns his club brothers have unknowingly attacked his own dad. The film ends, as Centron films often do, with some kind of jumping off point for classroom discussion. Whether this attack is serious enough to generate the kind of hysteria that ensues in the film, or would produce the kind of "teachable moment" the originators are looking for, is questionable. The bright side here is that the Mystery Science Theater crew got ahold of this and used it for one of their notorious shorts prior to their skewering of a feature film, 1963's wretched "Atomic Brain". Their commentary is very funny and makes this run of the mill classroom filmstrip almost watchable.

This short is bad, but it is a pure delight when compared to the shorts of the day that were made to sell products. Watch the short "The Selling Wizard", then watch this one and then this one seems amazing by comparison. This one features juvenile delinquents as they terrorize a town and beat up some dude in a car before picking up their buddy. Their buddy's dad just happens to be the guy they beat up. What a moral dilemma!!! From this short we see that children and teens of all eras have been behaving badly and probably always will be. Here they are beating up their buddy's pop, today they are berating people on facebook causing said person to commit suicide. Of course, from that example one thing is clear to see, we are much weaker mentally and emotionally than we were then thanks to political correctness and all the people who put it in people's heads that words hurt worse than bricks and sticks. We are also a society today that will punish a person for beating someone down for running his mouth instead of saying 'they had it coming'. This short has council meetings and such as the town wants to impose a curfew, and of course all the popular kids want to make a point that not all of them are bad, these days it is the popular kids that are bad cause they are the one's with parents that instill within their kids a sense of entitlement. Things change, but there will always be teens misbehaving.

This short film is quite dated in that it takes a look at children misbehaving. Compared to what children do these days, these kids look very well behaved. Anyway, there's a problem at a local school and they have to do something about it. What they actually do is not revealed, however. Some pretty bad acting that's inherent in most Centron productions shoots this one down.

Knuckleknob glory! Teenage angst is being conned by the 1950s milkshake gang. Beware of disturbing images of people from Kansas in the 1950s. Aka MST3K. GLORY TO ALL!