Ladies
What do you get if you put Mamie van Doren, Paul Anka, The Platters, Mel Torme, the useless sons of a handful of Depression-era comedians and the cinematic sub-genre of "Girls Gone Bad" into a blender and hit the 'frappe' button? That's right; the end of civilisation as we know it! Or, if it happens to be 1959, 'Girls Town'!
Mamie van Doren, sporting enough peroxide to bleach a mammoth, is accused of the murder of Chip, scion of a wealthy local family. There's no evidence against her, but this is the 1950s, when looking like a cheap tramp meant that you were probably guilty of everything going.
So Mamie is collected by Mother Veronica, x-treme nun, and taken off to Girls Town, which oddly enough resembles a small but expensive Ivy League college. Mother Veronica is a feisty but kindly old Catholic penguin, and treats Mamie with gentleness and patience, which is more than can be said for the other girls, who are either evil, bat-shit crazy or, in one unfortunate case, sporting an extra chromosome. Yikes! Poor Mamie soon finds out that Girls Town isn't all giggling, pillow fights, doing each other's hair and talking about boys.
Mamie needs a friend, so she takes Serafina, who falls into the 'bat-shit crazy' category, under her wing. Serafina is in love with Paul Anka, who, by using every ounce of his acting ability in his first motion picture role, plays a singing teen heartthrob named Jimmy. Paul Anka tries to be nice and let Serafina down gently, but her love is of the weird, obsessive, bunny-boiling kind, and frankly I doubt she'll be satisfied until she's made couch cushions out of his skin.
Because he's so nice, Paul Anka agrees to help the girls prove that Mamie is innocent, which mainly involves him running errands in his car. Perhaps to compensate for only being 5'5", Paul Anka gets about in the largest car ever built by human hands. It has two doors, no roof, and its own postcode. Each one of its tail fins contains more steel than an entire Honda Civic, and poor little Paul Anka rattles around in it like a lost button in a tumble dryer.
Meanwhile, there's a single witness to Chip's death, and that's wealthy young buck Mel Torme. He's a cad, but as he drives a gorgeous Jaguar XK-120 roadster, it's very difficult to hate him. It's hard to say exactly what Mel Torme is supposed to be; he seems to act like a teenager, but he was 34 years old at the time of filming, and looked about 50 for most of his life, what with his sparse hair and a chin that seems to be attempting to recede into the back of his throat. Maybe he was supposed to be somebody's Dad standing in for his delinquent son while the latter was at reform school? Who knows?
It eventually transpires that Mamie's kid sister, another good time girl with an overdeveloped relationship with the peroxide bottle, was the one Mel Torme saw with Chip on the night he died. It further transpires that Chip's death was an accident. Mamie is vindicated, as long as she can persuade Mel to testify in her defence. Mel is reluctant, but he caves as soon as he realises that she's backed up by nuns, a schoolgirl who knows judo, Paul Anka, and the pomade in Paul Anka's hair (which weighs more than he does, thus technically making it an independent entity).
The film ends with a wiser, more accepting Mamie leaving Girls Town and heading off into her future with her sister and Paul Anka in his Cadillac Brontosaurus. The closing credits kick in before the inevitable scene of a jealousy-crazed Serafina taking them all out with a sniper rifle from the Girls Town bell tower.
Mamie van Doren, sporting enough peroxide to bleach a mammoth, is accused of the murder of Chip, scion of a wealthy local family. There's no evidence against her, but this is the 1950s, when looking like a cheap tramp meant that you were probably guilty of everything going.
So Mamie is collected by Mother Veronica, x-treme nun, and taken off to Girls Town, which oddly enough resembles a small but expensive Ivy League college. Mother Veronica is a feisty but kindly old Catholic penguin, and treats Mamie with gentleness and patience, which is more than can be said for the other girls, who are either evil, bat-shit crazy or, in one unfortunate case, sporting an extra chromosome. Yikes! Poor Mamie soon finds out that Girls Town isn't all giggling, pillow fights, doing each other's hair and talking about boys.
Mamie needs a friend, so she takes Serafina, who falls into the 'bat-shit crazy' category, under her wing. Serafina is in love with Paul Anka, who, by using every ounce of his acting ability in his first motion picture role, plays a singing teen heartthrob named Jimmy. Paul Anka tries to be nice and let Serafina down gently, but her love is of the weird, obsessive, bunny-boiling kind, and frankly I doubt she'll be satisfied until she's made couch cushions out of his skin.
Because he's so nice, Paul Anka agrees to help the girls prove that Mamie is innocent, which mainly involves him running errands in his car. Perhaps to compensate for only being 5'5", Paul Anka gets about in the largest car ever built by human hands. It has two doors, no roof, and its own postcode. Each one of its tail fins contains more steel than an entire Honda Civic, and poor little Paul Anka rattles around in it like a lost button in a tumble dryer.
Meanwhile, there's a single witness to Chip's death, and that's wealthy young buck Mel Torme. He's a cad, but as he drives a gorgeous Jaguar XK-120 roadster, it's very difficult to hate him. It's hard to say exactly what Mel Torme is supposed to be; he seems to act like a teenager, but he was 34 years old at the time of filming, and looked about 50 for most of his life, what with his sparse hair and a chin that seems to be attempting to recede into the back of his throat. Maybe he was supposed to be somebody's Dad standing in for his delinquent son while the latter was at reform school? Who knows?
It eventually transpires that Mamie's kid sister, another good time girl with an overdeveloped relationship with the peroxide bottle, was the one Mel Torme saw with Chip on the night he died. It further transpires that Chip's death was an accident. Mamie is vindicated, as long as she can persuade Mel to testify in her defence. Mel is reluctant, but he caves as soon as he realises that she's backed up by nuns, a schoolgirl who knows judo, Paul Anka, and the pomade in Paul Anka's hair (which weighs more than he does, thus technically making it an independent entity).
The film ends with a wiser, more accepting Mamie leaving Girls Town and heading off into her future with her sister and Paul Anka in his Cadillac Brontosaurus. The closing credits kick in before the inevitable scene of a jealousy-crazed Serafina taking them all out with a sniper rifle from the Girls Town bell tower.
posted by Blandwagon at 6:25 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home