Jail Bait

A morality play a la Reefer Madness, with guns instead of grass. Marilyn Gregor (Dolores Fuller), a fifties good-girl, is bailing out her brother Don (Clancy Malone), who's been run in for gun possession. Although Don's father is a prestigious plastic surgeon, Don Jr. has renounced this respectable profession in favor of a life of crime. He's pretty incorrigible if he's got a gun in his hand so after Marilyn drives him home, he gets a revolver from a hollowed out book to replace the one the cops confiscated and goes out to meet his henchman, Vic Brady (Timothy Farrell), at a downtown watering hole. It seems the two have one last caper to commit before bedtime: they hold up an office for $23,000 in theater payroll checks. Unfortunately, the holdup goes wrong; Don kills a security guard/retired cop and Vic tags a fleeing secretary but doesn't kill her. The cops arrive but Don and Vic shake them after a languid car chase that (maybe because Ed Wood forgot to get a shooting permit and didn't want anyone to know he was making a movie) obeys all traffic laws. They're safe for the time being but the secretary they failed to kill is a living witness so word gets out soon enough that Don is a cop killer. Choked by remorse, Don visits his father's office and Doctor Gregor convinces him to surrender to the authorities. But Vic catches Don there, takes him back to Vic's hideout, and after a brief altercation shoots him dead. Vic and his girlfriend Loretta (Theodora Thurman) trick Doctor Gregor the plastic surgeon into giving Vic a new face to escape the law, using for leverage a claim that they are holding Don hostage. When Doctor Gregor discovers that Don is already dead, he gets revenge by surreptitiously giving Vic Don's face. The police identify Vic as Don, the cop killer, and kill him after a quick and bloodless shootout. Justice having been done, we can all shake our heads ruefully and go home.

An essentially unremarkable cops-and-robbers potboiler, Jail Bait is pretty good evidence that Ed Wood gets far too much credit for making bad films. Though Wood's dialogue delivers the occasional trademark nonsequitur-when a police inspector (Lyle Talbot) explains to Marilyn that "carrying a gun can be dangerous business," she rejoins that "building a skyscraper" can be dangerous business, too, thus demonstrating that she's missed his point entirely-by and large this movie is marginally competent. I wouldn't make such a point out of this except that Ed Wood's "badness" is the key component of his continued notoriety; I guess I'm suggesting that anyone who's seen a movie as wretched as Paranoia or Blood Sisters (to name two of about four billion examples) should be unimpressed by Wood's supposed ineptitude.

The movie is most interesting when it's suggesting that our free wills and capacity to make decisions abandon us in the face of relatively banal stimuli-in this case, the condition of holding a gun in his hand is enough to make Don take leave of his senses and start shooting everyone in sight. Several times he insists that "I never thought it would come to this," just as the dope smokers of Reefer Madness seem to watch on helplessly as their own lives go up in bubbly, gurgling lung-smoke just because they couldn't see the long-term peril in a puff of marijuana. Doctor Gregor provides the obligatory Freudian theory for Don's miscreantism-turns out Dad spoiled Don as a child and the little fellow also suffered from an absent mother, "God rest her soul"-but this is largely an afterthought. The more Doctor Gregor and Marilyn sacrifice themselves for Don, the more we realize his upbringing was just fine; he simply can't think straight when he has a pistol in his hand. When Doc and Marilyn are preparing to meet with Vic for the first time the movie seems to consider pursuing this idea seriously-Marilyn, wanting only to protect Don, drops another in an apparently interminable supply of handguns into her purse-but once there the gun never resurfaces so the movie never makes good on its promise to transform Marilyn into a murderous fiend once she decides to pack heat.

Don't be fooled by the tagline-underage girls are not the "jail bait" of this movie's title. Guns are. Guns. Get it?

First of all, let me say that the title Jail Bait has to do with a gun and not under-age sex. This is one of Ed Wood's classics. Yes, it's horrible and the movie is so cheap it's funny. However, it's not as "good" as Plan 9.

Things to watch for:

The doctor's office. His desk is huge. When ever anyone wants to sit down, the have to squeeze between a plant and chair.

The music - it's horrible and ALWAYS playing. Even when someones parking a car the suspenseful guitar music begins strumming.

The doc performs plastic surgery in a guys living room! On his couch! At gun point!

Steve Reeves first movie - he takes his shirt off to prove it's him.

Worth the rental. The scenes in the theater (with the exception of a horrible and really kind of shocking black-face act thrown in for no reason at all) made me laugh out loud.

In "Jail Bait", Ed Wood applies his boundless enthusiasm and limited talent to the crime movie genre. From a technical viewpoint, it's actually one of his less unsound features, although that cuts down somewhat on the unintentional laughs that it provides. The story is actually pretty solid, and could have served as the basis for a pretty good film-noir. Most of its weaknesses are in the acting, pacing, and dialogue, plus the occasional zany out-of-place detail.

The story uses a basically familiar setup, but adds a couple of extra components to it. Lyle Talbot and Steve Reeves play a pair of policemen investigating the misdeeds of a young man whose father is a highly respected doctor. The doctor and his daughter, meanwhile, try to protect the son both from the police and from the career criminal who has led him astray. For the most part, the story is conventional but believable, with a rather clever ending.

Most of the rest of the production does not come up to the level of the story. The ever-loyal Talbot gives his typically earnest performance, trying to make the dialogue sound as good as possible, while enduring some amusingly awkward interactions with the stilted Reeves. The rest of the cast is generally nondescript, and sometimes noticeably out of their depth.

The dialogue contains some of the expected unintentional laughs, and the characters often overexert themselves on unnecessary exposition or on pointing out details that were already completely obvious. The pacing, likewise, is inconsistent from scene to scene, although with fewer of the kinds of direction and editing slip-ups that generally characterize Wood's features.

No one could ever deny that Wood loved making movies, and he made sincere efforts to make them as well as he could, which is what has kept his movies so watchable despite their shortcomings. "Jail Bait" attempts to emulate the classics of its genre, but it is severely limited by the lack of talent and other resources.

Yes, it's inept directing, bad acting, illogical continuity etc. etc.

But it's fascinating! Everybody can do a cheap shot at Wood and repeat the degrading clichés but it is my impression that most people don't judge for themselves or play along for the ride. It's worth it. It is a fact that hallmarks of a "good movie" are: 1) it entertained you, 2) you remember it with enthusiasm. And it did both for me.

The music was so bold and different and had everything to do with creating the atmosphere in the film. I really liked it because I felt it worked for it's purpose. It gave the film it's very own identity.

I would anytime rather see an Ed Wood film than most of the Hollywood clichés poured out these days. I prefer Ed Wood for Steven Spielberg any day because you feel Wood does it for his own sake, not just to please the lowest denominator.

Ed Wood is mostly known for his complete ineptness behind (and in front of) the camera in such "bad" film "classics" as "Glen or Glenda" "Bride of the Monster" and "Plan 9 From Outer Space." However, Wood's brief foray into film noir, "Jail Bait", is notable for a few reasons. The first and foremost of which is that it was the first screen appearance of the legendary muscle man Steve Reeves, who was later immortalized in the "Hercules" pictures. "Jail Bait" is a somewhat misleading title, as it is a phrase that usually refers to women who are trouble, more specifically, underaged women who are trouble. In this film that simply isn't the case - the "jail bait" is more the main character's fascination with the underworld. The Rhino Video release of this film is labeled the "director's cut" because it features a short burlesque striptease segment in the place of the original segment which featured a comedian in blackface. Unfortunately, the edit is so poorly executed that it becomes painfully obvious that this "director's cut" was most likely made by the owner of the copyright. The film is just as inept as most of Ed Wood's films, though it is a little more intriguing, as it is set in a less "fictional" environment and features attempts, late in the running time, at plot twists. Plus, lovely international model Theadora Thurman plays the femme fatale (though she's a terrible actress). A necessary rental for Ed Wood or "bad movie" fans, and possibly an educational video on how NOT to do film noir.