Released: 1966

Directed by: Sande N. Johnsen

Cast: Diane Conti, Linda Gale, Eileen Dietz, Robin Nolan, John Betis, George Winship, and Joey Naudic as Nino.

Tubi Roulette is a little game I like to play sometimes. The rules are simple. First go on Tubi. Scroll around until you find a movie you’ve watched before, or piques your interest. Click on the movie and scroll down to the ‘You might also like’ list. From the ten films listed, pick one, preferably something you haven’t seen or heard of, and watch it. That’s how I found 1966’s Teenage Gang Debs, a zero-budget juvenile delinquency exploitation film.

I watched it, thought about it, and found this movie to be a complex oddity.

The story opens with a gang leaders’ girlfriend, who has cheated on him. Members of the gang assault, rape and physically scar her. An unusual and unpleasant way to start a movie, yet there it is. Cue opening titles.

After the titles, Terry (Diane Conti) a young lady who has just moved with her parents from Manhattan to Brooklyn, walks into a bar looking for the leader of ‘The Rebels’. That would be Johnny (John Batis).

Terry challenges Johnny’s new girlfriend to a fight, if Terry wins, she becomes Johnny’s girl. Johnny likes this idea. The girls fight, Terry wins and starts to eat away at the Rebels hierarchy, beginning by gaslighting Johnny. Terry gaslights Johnny into a knife fight with the Rebels’ second in command, Nino (Joey Naudic).

Nino punctures Johnny, and has his body dumped in a rival gang’s territory. A tactic that the fuzz always falls for. Nino is now leader of The Rebels, and the gang is okay with that.

There are rumbles and knife fights as Terry gets into Nino’s head, making him more power crazed and irrational. Terry creates threats that don’t exist causing tension with allied gangs, and within The Rebels themselves.

The Rebels have had a standing policy that if you want to leave the gang, you could without any bad feelings. Wanting a regular job, marry his girl, and live a life on the straight and narrow, a gang member comes forward wanting to quit. Terry, the lovable, compassionate person that she is, goes off the deep end. New rule, no one leaves The Rebels without her or Nino’s permission. The gang is aghast, as Nino backs up Terry. He has a knife fight with the guy who wants to leave, defeats him, and has his body dumped in a rival gang’s territory, which the fuzz falls for. Terry has gone too far.

Thinking Nino wants to see her, Terry is lured to the clubhouse, where she finds the Rebels’ girls waiting for her. The girls beat Terry up, disfiguring her face, to the point no guy would want to be with her. The end.

While watching Teenage Gang Debs, I was waiting for the reveal that Terry was the sister of the girl from the beginning of the film looking for revenge. The expected never happened. I suppose the connection between the two girls is more ironic and nothing more. The girl from the beginning of the film being attacked by guys for betraying their leader. Terry being attacked by the ‘chicks’ for betraying the gang. Terry, it turned out, was just plain bad.

Released in 1966, Teenage Gang Debs comes at a delicate time between the Kennedy era and the hippy movement. The film reflects more of the 50s, while featuring some raw documentary style cinemaphotography that is more in tune with the 60s. Cars on the city streets are definitely from the early 1960s.

The film is like the Island of Misfit Toys of movies. Trapped in a vortex of changing times. It’s hip and outdated at the sametime. The characters talking about rumbles reminds me of the Fonz, and greasers. The ‘chicks’ are dancing wearing white go-go boots, to songs featuring the latest dance craze of the minute (Black Belt is very strange, but the kids seem to like it), was a fad out of the 60s. As a bonus, some of the coolest slang has been gathered into one convenient 72-minute location. It’s these sorts of things that make Teenage Gang Debs a temporal oddity that even Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! can’t boast of, which makes this film a lost treasure of a weird time period.

I couldn’t find anything about the production of the film, except director Sande N Johnsen was a New York based maker of underground sexploitation films from 1963-68. Teenage Gang Debs falls in the middle of his filmography. Judging from the titles of his other films, this one was quite tame.

For me the film was an unexpected deep dive into New York City’s underground movie scene. An area where few people I know would fear to tread. If you dare, tread carefully. The actors are possibly from off, off, off, off Broadway. Car headlights are used to light exterior scenes, interiors are lit with single spotlights. The audio sounds as if it may have been recorded on an Edison wax cylinder. So be prepared.

This forgotten film, revived by streaming services like Tubi, is kind of finding new life. Teenage Gang Debs will probably be of interest only to the most devoted cinephiles and lovers of exploitation cinema. And that perhaps is how a film on the cutting edge of a temporal vortex should exist.

Teenage Gang Debs is on many free streaming services; I found it on Tubi.