Junkyardfilms.com’s Moldy Oldie Movie of the Month!: Bobbie’s Battle for the Title “Worst Movie Ever Made” BAD GIRLS DO CRY vs. LOVE CAPTIVE

Title: Bobbie’s Battle for the Title “Worst Movie Ever Made” BAD GIRLS DO CRY vs. LOVE CAPTIVE

Year of Release—Film: 1965 / 1969



Back in 2006 on a late-summer evening, I popped a DVD titled BAD GIRLS DO CRY into my player and within minutes, angels sang from the heavens, the sky opened, and beamed down a ray of light upon this long-sought object of my curiosity, THE WORST MOVIE EVER MADE! As the final credits rolled, I was already feverishly typing these words...

After years and years of searching, I have finally found it! THE WORST MOVIE EVER MADE!!!! BAD GIRLS DO CRY has a release date of 1965 but was obviously made in the mid-to-late 50's. Sid Melton, comic and director of the TV show "Make Room for Daddy" directed this... if you can call this hodge-podge of unrelated scenes directed. Misty Ayers, one-time burlesque dancer and stripper, plays Sally, a small-town girl who goes to the big city only to find herself trapped in a web of prostitution and drugs. There she meets first-time trick Tommy Cole and falls for his boyish charms. He tries to help her escape but fails and he is later gunned down by Mr. Big. In retaliation, Sally stabs Mr. Big to death as the narrator warns the audience of the perils that befall young girls in big city sin palaces. FYI... while Misty Ayers does remove her clothing twice, she's never completely nude. Women wore more back then and removing it was very complicated and time-consuming.

Amazing in it's ineptness with abysmal melodramatic acting, non-synced post-dubbed voices and sound effects, painfully unfunny comedic bits and sloppy editing, what makes this movie float to the top of the cesspool of bad filmdom is it's amazing choice of background music. Wagnerian marches give way to swelling harp solos, then quickly shift to 50's game show themes without so much as a thought that they work for the scene or not. Music would start, then stop, then start again without reason. Take this scene... Sally goes to the house not knowing that she is falling into a den of iniquity and enters to the sound of a Valkyriean operatic swell as if some major battle is about to begin. She's shown to a room where she removes her complicated system of undergarments and is sexually assaulted by Mr. Big. During the assault, there's a quick unexplained cut to a woman tidying up a front room and then back to the assault and subsequent drugging. Meanwhile, the music has inexplicably changed from a warlike march to a lighter, happier melody. This happens throughout the movie with such unexpectedness that I almost got whiplash!

I feel like singing! I feel like dancing in the street and shooting off fireworks! I feel like... crying. Now that I've fulfilled my life's mission and seen the worst movie ever made, what will I do for the next 40 years? *sigh* Check this one out, people. It's on a triple-feature Something Weird Video release and is available from Netflix. By the way, the other two movies on the disc, GIRL IN TROUBLE and GOOD TIMES WITH A BAD GIRL, are equally painful morality plays.

MSTJunkie (Retired)

Happily, I stopped searching, basking in the warm certainty that my hunt for the worst of the worst was finally over. However, recently a loyal reader informed me that, in his opinion, I was wrong. There was a movie out there that, if not worse, is equal to BAD GIRLS DO CRY in both the pain levels and endurance required to sit through and that's Larry Crane's THE LOVE CAPTIVE (1969). He encouraged me to hunt down a copy and watch it to compare it with my 2006 "eureka moment". This is what I discovered, but first...a word about director Larry Crane. Larry made six movies in the late 60's and disappeared. Literally. IMDb.com has no bio and, after hours of searching, I gave up on trying to find any info on this strange and elusive B-movie director.

The Love Captive (1969) has no actors / actresses names in the main title. The movie is narrated in post-production and, again, no names are used. A young woman, we'll call her Ann, walks through Greenwich Village and checks into a cheap, fleabag hotel. She goes upstairs, removes her clothes (while the narrator urges her to hurry up), has sex with the bellman, dresses again and leaves to visit a local Torture Museum. She over-stays and is locked in for the night. Suddenly, a Wolfman appears along with a nude woman with vampire teeth and dirt-blackened feet. They proceed to grope each other on top of a coffin while three nude female dancers gyrate lethargically. Ann sits in an electric chair showing absolutely no emotion. After what seems forever, the Wolfman, the vampiress and the three dancers leave through a brick wall and Ann steals a straitjacket off a display.

Meanwhile, back at the hotel, two guys in topcoats broadcast threats through the walls at other female residents. This is never explained and we are left to wonder are they cops? Or is this some perverse gay foreplay? Ann returns and undresses. Enter the lesbian from next door, supposedly frightened by the broadcasted threat and she an Ann engage in some bored and boring same-sex action.
A lady with a shady past goes to the Museum and, after threatening the current owner and bedding him, takes charge. She ramps up the theme by having one of the former three nude dancers gyrate in the window while she goes into a carnie-like spiel about the wonders inside. The two men continue to broadcast threats until they get bored or something and wander away. The Museum's former owner returns, discovers to his horror what has been going on and forces the return of his business and his straitjacket. Ann goes back to her room, undresses and gets some horizontal lovin' from an extremely hairy man wearing dark socks. The end.

Ok...that sucked, didn't it!?! The only positive thing I can say about this movie is that it offers a glimpse of Greenwich Village back when it was a seedier place before the Yuppies gentrified it. I can't say the acting sucked because, frankly, these are no actors. All of them just wandered through the action without motivation or expression. The narration sounded spur-of-the-moment. At 63 minutes, it felt hours too long! There was one 'HUH!?!" moment where I actually recognized one actor as having acted in the other Crane movie I own, All Women Are Bad (1969). But, I didn't recognize him by his face but by his hairy backside! LOL!

So, there you have it. The two contenders for the title of WORST MOVIE EVER MADE. While it's easy to notice their similarities (both are from the 60's, both are in B&W and are narrated in post-production and both star relative unknowns), we're here to decide which is worse. In the nudity category, THE LOVE CAPTIVE wins hands-down because, let's face it, there wasn't much need for a clothing budget! In the plot category, BAD GIRLS DO CRY would win by the fact that is does have some plot, however basic and badly written. Narrative work goes to BAD GIRLS because at least the narrator is reading from a script, unlike LOVE CAPTIVE's more free-style, seemingly unscripted narrative. The camera work is a tie because both look as if they were shot by Abraham Zapruder. Editing? Forget about it! Budget constraints probably didn't leave much footage of either movie on the editing room floor! If this were the Oscar's "the envelope, please" moment, it would be...a tie! And I'm just as disappointed as you are! More, probably, because that means all those years ago, I WAS wrong! So, I throw myself on the mercy of the readers. You decide for yourself!

[Author’s Note: If anyone has any info on the elusive Larry Crane, please email me!]

MSTJunkie