S01E12 - Untamed Youth

Plot

Two young women are hitchhiking their way to California when they are picked up as vagrants by the local police. Rather than serve jail time, they choose to work on a cotton farm as cotton pickers along with other young men and women serving time. But they quickly learn that the cotton farm's owner intends to abuse his position of authority as much as he can and has darker ideas in store for his indentured labor.


Movie Review

The first movie of season one that isn't a sci-fi or fantasy flick, Untamed Youth is a camp teen exploitation flick that knows exactly what it wants to show off, and both of them belong to Mamie Van Doren. While it doesn't descend to the depths of film atrocity that previous MST3K offerings have, this film is a piece of cinematic shlock whose only thing of worth is its trainwreck factor.

The plot setup is an intriguing one, admittedly: a corrupt cotton farm owner and his partner, a complicit female judge, use the court system to send juveniles to work at the farm for mere pittances to serve out their sentences, resulting in cheap labor. The two protagonists, a couple of female traveling performers, end up getting booked for vagrancy and sent to this farm, where they have to endure all kinds of terrible circumstances from tiring cotton-picking to cramped living quarters, from being threatened with sexual assault by the owner to eating dog food. Though not the most sophisticated of setups, some decent writing could've made it an entertaining story.

But that's the problem we have here: a lack of good writing, as well as other things. A lot of the same tropes that have befallen other bad films befall this film, including: characters who are nothing more than caricatures, from the sinister cotton farm owner to the air-headed sexy female lead; cringe-worthy dialogue that screams of movie suits trying to make their film sound "hip"; plot contrivances that show a lack of quality control; and a shoe-horned love story between one of the female leads and the handsome male protagonist. It's all right if a movie doesn't wish to redefine movies as we know it, but is it asking too much to take a risk somewhere and not base the plot of others that came before it?

The big draw of this film is, of course, Mamie Van Doren, a Hollywood sex symbol whose most prized assets (both of them) are on full display in this film (or at least as much as a Hollywood film could get away with in those days). A big indication of her being the main draw has to do with the fact that she sings in several songs throughout the film, which wouldn't be so bad if the songs she sings weren't so atrocious. Though Ms. Van Doren does have a reasonable singing voice, she should fire her songwriters, as they wrote some of the most pap-laced pieces of garbage ever committed to audio. What really irks me about these songs is that they often try to sound sexual (by 1950s standards), but end up sounding juvenile. What's worse, the script calls for the actors watching Van Doren sing to cry out, as if happily "shocked" to hear such crass innuendo. It doesn't work. Oh, god, it doesn't work.

But Ms. Van Doren should be happy that of all the songs she sings in this film, she doesn't sing the worst one. No, that honor goes to Eddie Cochran, who croons the song "Cottonpicker". Unlike the other songs, which are sung at dances in the film, "Cottonpicker" is sung in the middle of a cotton field, suggesting this movie is some kind of musical when it clearly isn't. And the song itself has no chorus, just verses, but each verse repeats one line three times. It's annoying, it's lazy, and it's just awful.

Beyond these reasons, the movie also suffers from several tone shifts. Untamed Youth mostly plays itself as a lighthearted pseudo-rebellion flick interspersed with terrible music, but then it tries to get serious with scenes of near sexual assault, a pregnant woman's death, and cross-country slavery. These moments destroy much of the film's overall camp value and jars noticeably with the more light-toned segments.

In all, the only reason to watch this flick is to witness Ms. Van Doren's gorgeous self parading around the film in various states of sensual dress, although those who value atrocious musical pieces will find plenty to love here as well.


MST3K Review

Some have said that this episode is perhaps the best episode of MST3K's first season, thanks to really good riffing and a watchable film (in one sense). While I don't agree that the film is entirely watchable, I do agree that Joel and the bots' riffing in this episode is particularly strong, definitely on par at the least with some of the stronger episodes from this season. By now I've also started to become used to them talking over some of the dialogue, although they didn't do it so flagrantly in this episode. The big exception, of course, is when Joel calls Gypsy into the theater to make cotton for Tom Servo while a meaningless conversation goes on in the film. This is the kind of dialogue that deserves to be talked over, and the improved timing of the jokes suggest that Joel and the bots realize this as well.