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Movie: Untamed Youth:
Mamie Van Doren sparkles with boobs akimbo in this fifties teen
prison farm potboiler. No opportunity to show her in her
underwear is wasted. Jane Lowe (Mamie Van Doren) and her sister
Penny are arrested for swimming in—guess what?—their underwear
and are sentenced to thirty days. The sisters then become
entangled in the old work-farm setup, where they get paid
pennies and have to buy everything so they owe their souls to
the company store and never get out. This is of course the same
labor system used successfully today by large fruit-picking
companies from California to Florida. The camp is run by a big
white man named Tropp, who's stiffer than a Ken doll and not as
good an actor. He's been gettin' him some from the old lady
judge who is probably related to him and sends him his convict
laborers in a relationship snugger than Mrs. Mulwray's immediate
family in Chinatown. Wasting no time, Mamie strips down to her
underwear and does a song. The teen convicts, or titular untamed
youth, work long, brutal hours in the hot sun, yet seem to have
no problem cleaning up all nice and throwing impromptu sock hops
in the barn. It's all fun and games until somebody gets killed,
then a strange Mexican man enters the picture as some sort of
spiritual harbinger of Tropp's demise.
— Kevin Murphy
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Prologue:
Joel, having removed Tom's head, discovers a magnetic tapeworm
about a gazillion feet long inside Tom's torso.
Invention:
Joel has invented a pipe with a smoke detector and fire
extinguisher built right in so that you can't light it; it works
every time but the last, when Joel has to look into the pipe and
it squirts it with water and howls of laughter ensue. The Mads
have developed "tongue puppets" and we get to see Dr. Erhardt's
kisser up really close and a moist little rubber critter who
looks a little too much like a French tickler pops out and Larry
can't talk too well because his tongue is sticking out with a
little rubber thingy on the end and, thank God, it's movie sign.
Segment 2:
Joel, Tom, and Crow present the biography of TV's Greg Brady
from The Brady Bunch, inspired by the fact that one of the women
in the film bears a disturbing resemblance to actor Barry
Williams. Chilling.
Segment 3:
Crow has a flashback, in which Joel hooks up Gypsy's brain to
Cambot, and we find out that the serene Gypsy has nothing in her
subconscious thoughts but Richard Basehart and a dinner of ram
chips. Ultimately we are left wondering why the hell this scene
had to be a flashback at all, though this issue is never
addressed.
Segment 4:
Having been programmed to replicate raw cotton, Gypsy gets a bit
urpy and regurgitates not only bales of cotton, but saltwater
taffy, paper towels, and a sort of embryonic Tom Servo. Crow
sneaks in for a few bars of the Wiener Man song.
Segment 5:
Joel, at the behest of Tom and Crow, delivers an exegesis of the
Goofy Guy, the Arnold Stang-like character in today's movie.
However, instead of a valuable hermeneutical discourse, the guys
put on goofy hats and glasses and gyrate a lot.
Stinger:
None.
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This show was the basis for our first
negative review, from Gore Zone, a film magazine dedicated to
the kind of movies in which people's heads explode like wood
ticks and bloodied demon children are ripped from the loins of
their usually naked hosts. In its Summer, Bloody Summer issue of
September 1990, sandwiched between a review of Dead Pit and
Inseminoid, was a capsule summation calling our show "the most
insulting blow to (the Comedy Channel's ) viewership," and
complaining about the fact that we talked over Eddie Cochran's
only song in this movie. We can only apologize to the folks at
Gore Zone, and hope that the Criterion Laser Disc Edition of
Untamed Youth comes out soon, so they can experience the rich
fullness of Eddie Cochran in complete silence and with rapt
attention. Thank you, Gore Zone, for revealing our unseen
faults. We're sorry for what we have done to you, and we will
never ever talk over another movie again, ever.
On a personal
note, I must admit to the world at large that I most loved the
scenes in which Mamie Van Doren appears in a bra. It's just the
whole gestalt of prison and Mamie and bras and, well, I'm sorry,
call me sick, but it's just one of those things. Mamie looked
really, really neat.
— Kevin Murphy
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