 601 - GIRLS TOWN
Genre: ’50s Teen Drama (1959, B&W)
Synopsis: A young girl fights off a guy and he slips and falls off a cliff to his death.
The girl’s older sister (the full-figured Mamie Van Doren) is blamed and is sent to Girls Town, a home for wayward girls
that’s run by Catholic Nuns.
The place is full of tough talking girls who, if you get out of line, make you scrub the floor!
(Pretty brutal stuff going on here). Meanwhile, another girl at Girls Town thinks singer Paul Anka is her boyfriend/fiancé/husband and attempts suicide when he dances with someone else.
And Mel Tormé also stars as the oldest “teen” in the movie, who just likes to drive around in a sports car and eats hamburgers.
Finally, Van Doren has to save her sister from being sent to Tijuana by
Tormé, so she gets help from some of the other people and they attempt a rescue.
There’s a lot of singing in this by Anka and one song by the Platters, but
– surprisingly – Tormé doesn’t sing a thing (I guess they
couldn’t fit the “Christmas Song” in the movie).
Don’s Review: This is a campy fun movie
to watch. And the riffing on this was superb, effectively spoofing this
film. But the host segments were only decent and not very
memorable. Still, despite the somewhat weak host segments,
this is a great episode and one of the best of this entire
season.
Trivia Note: This episode has the first appearance of the Umbilicus connecting Deep 13 to the SOL (leading to the obligatory pie-in-the-face gag).
Don’s Rating: 
Forrest’s Review: Girls Town is one of those
type movies that I would usually not enjoy in an MST3K episode, but for some reason, I enjoyed
this one a lot. This is mainly because the riffing is so freaking good in
it. The riffs are constantly on target and, as Don said, effectively
spoof the movie.
I especially liked when Mike and the bots would make fun of the
character Jimmy.
And I’m not going to repeat any of the riffs about him in my reviews because
they’re so good, I’d like you to hear them for
yourself. The movie is really not that bad. It’s not good either, but
it’s not bad either, or what I meant to say is, it’s not bad
enough!
All the characters have plenty for Mike and the bots to make fun of.
The host segments are average at best, as they are all amusing, but not laugh out loud funny.
The biggest problem with the feature Girls Town is that
it’s not bad enough.
What I mean by that is, what makes most MST3K episodes more fun than
just the riffing are the bad edits, the horrific
dialogue, the cheesy costumes, the zipper you can see on the monster suit.
So although the riffing in this episode is probably the best and most consistent ever, the movie
itself just can’t support the riffs for me.
I wouldn’t say that they fell flat, because they didn’t, the riffs were truly remarkable, but they sometimes just
didn’t get as big of laughs from me as they deserved.
Don’t get me wrong, there were plenty of big laughs for me in this episode, but the movie was simply not bad enough. But
this episode goes by very fast because of the riffing, and although I have laughed much harder and much more in other episodes, the clever and high quality riffing in this
episode earns it a perfect rating from me.
Forrest’s Rating:
|
