mrb1980 When I saw the title "Girl Gang", I assumed I'd see a Mamie Van Doren movie imitation, with lots of dumb situations, ridiculous dialogue, and a laughable script. This movie about drug addiction in the early 50s is incredibly cheap and not funny at all.A group of high schoolers looking for fun unwisely become involved with "Joe" (Timothy Farrell) and "Doc" (Harry Keaton), a drug pusher and his doctor supplier, respectively. A few puffs of "weed" lead to addiction, robbery, murder, blackmail, prostitution, bankruptcy and just about everything else. The kids graduate from "weed" to heroin, becoming so addicted that their lives are ruined. The acting is horrible and the situations unbelievable, but for some reason the proceedings just aren't funny.I did learn a lot: a heroin injection is a "joy pop", heroin withdrawal is "the jumpin jives", a person can overdose almost fatally on "weed", and 10-minute piano solos seem to be a lot of fun. Instead of being unintentionally funny like "Reefer Madness" however, "Girl Gang" is really pretty depressing. Its frank (though poorly acted) treatment of heroin addiction is just sad. Most of the actors never appeared in another film, which tells me something. If you want to laugh, watch "Untamed Youth" or "Girls Town", but be warned that "Girl Gang" is depressing and not funny. Maybe it was meant to be that way.

kapelusznik18 ****SPOILERS**** Movie about juvenile delinquency in the mid 1950's USA with a gang of teenage girls and their boy hangers ons, for drugs sex and party going, working for this sleazy drug pusher Joe who uses them to steal cars and blackmail, by screaming rape, their male victims. It's Joe's #1 squeeze June a drug addicted hooker who together with disbarred doctor, for preforming abortions on the side, Doc Bedford who run the operation luring clueless teenager into their gang and corrupting them with both drug & sex.Joe overplays his hand by staging a gas station robbery that goes bad with two of his main players or robbers Bill & Wander ending up being gun down by the gas station attendant after he himself was shot down by them. With Wanda barley hanging on to life she's rushed to Joe's hideout where Doc Bedford is ordered to preform a life saving operation on her without an antistatic. Being barley sober, after taking a few shots of whiskey, to get the job done he screws up big time letting Wanda die on the operating or better kitchen table after going into shock due to loss of blood. That's just as the police storm the place busting Joe & June with Doc Bedford taking to flight.***SPOILERS*** Doc Bedford's attempt to escape the long, in this case short, arm of the law ended up in disaster for the old guy. Shot in the back while fleeing the police, despite being unarmed, the Doc ends up fatally wounded in a drainage ditch and dies before medical help can arrive. As for Joe & June their facing long hard time behind bars for what they did as well as reprisals from their fellow convicts who in many case were, in being addicted on drugs, victims of theirs. P.S "Girl Gang" was released as a double feather with the Ed Wood classic "The Violent Years" that covered much of the same material, juvenile delinquency, that it did.

JoeB131 This was the cheap exploitation film of the 1950's, where a lot of things were implied but never actually said, such as prostitution, abortion and drug addiction.The film centers around a drug dealer named Joe who has a gang of girls who steal cars for him. but they are pretty much forgotten after the first act of the movie. The rest of the film involves clean cut white kids who get involved in various acts of depravity while become addicted to drugs.This is Poverty Row schlock, which was no doubt intended for... well, honestly, I'm not sure who the audience for this was. But it got made, and you can't unsee it once you've seen it...

zardoz-13 "Racket Girls" director Robert C. Dertano's thriller "Girl Gang" qualifies as a vintage exploitation movie about crime and narcotics. Mind you, this abysmally acted, 63-minute, black & white movie is strictly your standard dope-fiend film from fade-in to fade-out. Nevertheless, the casual use of marijuana and the extremely explicit depictions about both cooking heroin and injecting it respectively for men and women must have been controversial for its day. Producer George Weiss couldn't have received any dispensation from the Motion Picture Association of America because the still intact Production Code prohibited Hollywood from illustrating how to commit a crime, and using illegal narcotics very much constituted a crime in the 1950s. Otto Preminger didn't dare go as far out on the censorship limb as "Girl Gang" did in 1954 when he produced his own controversial Frank Sinatra epic "The Man with the Golden Arm" about heroin abuse in 1955 and altogether ignored the Production Code Seal of Approval. Otherwise, "Girl Gang" casts exploitation regular Timothy Farrell of "The Violent Years" and "The Devil's Sleep" as a two-bit crime boss who hooks teens on marijuana and/or heroin and dispatches them to crime crimes so they can fence him the goods and he can repay them with either pot or smack. "Girl Gang" does not entirely concern itself with distaff criminals. A quartet of devious dames hijacks a man's car on a lonely highway and leaves him sprawled unconscious on the pavement, but the bulk of the action follows the crime boss and his efforts to take advantage of women while they perform his dirty deeds. Eventually, the police catch up with him after the girl gang is shot-up by authorities and traced back to his hideout in an apartment complex. The subject matter contains greater historical relevance than the cinematic technique. There is a slackly staged gas station robbery toward the end of the action. Just about everything is run-of-the-mill, right down to William Thompson's cinematography.