TAMMY CLARK is a Girl in Trouble, a Farmer's Daughter from the sticks who runs off to the Big City in search of "glamour, bright lights, pretty clothes, and excitement" but, instead, becomes a maybe-murderess-lingerie-model-turned-stripper named "Jane Smith" in this fun, shot-in-New-Orleans melodrama-with-titty that's sleazy, nasty, and often downright hilarious!
Miss Clark plays Judy Collins, an All-American Girl-Next-Door in love with Johnny, her high-school sweetheart. But despite Johnny being "everything a girl could ask for," she secretly wants "a taste of life" and, figuring Johnny can wait, runs away from home and "takes her first steps toward destruction!" (Said steps are accompanied by wonderfully overwrought, overwritten narration that makes her "destruction" that much more comical.) Hitching a ride from A Stranger, she awakes from a nap with the guy trying to attack her. They fall out of the car and struggle on the ground until she bonks him on the head with a rock: "I didn't know if he was dead or not! I was past thinking!" Stealing his car, she hightails it into New Orleans, checks into a gloriously crappy flea-bag hotel, and tries to wash the blood off her brassiere — "Would I ever feel clean again?" — only to be spied upon by the creepy old codger that runs the place!
Quickly renting a room in a once-fancy mansion ("Real Charles Adams, ain't it?"), she makes friends with a haggard old hooker who gets her a gig modeling lingerie until — yup! — she gets attacked again! Not understanding the dynamics of cause and effect, our heroine next gets a job as a stripper (with a towering hairdo!) at The Club Flamingo until — oops! — who should enter the dressing room but Johnny.... Since the birth of motion pictures, no plot has been as consistently popular, no story has been so used, reused, and abused, as that of the good girl who falls into the perils of vice and corruption. Be it the innocent girl who's sent to jail, or the sweet young virgin forced to walk the streets, cinema loves girls in trouble! And, truth be told, so do we all, providing, of course, that the girl is really really good and the fall is really really bad. And Girl in Trouble — with its gritty location photography and bonus points for brief (but surprising for 1963) nudity — is yet another excellent exploitation version of the classic tale, made even more entertaining with a character who's as incredibly stupid as she is good, proving once again that stupid good girls getting into trouble is even more perverse fun than ordinary good girls getting into trouble, since it all but forces the viewer to shout at the screen such words of encouragement as, "You idiot," "What the hell is wrong with you," and "Wotta jerk!"
Writer-producer-director "Lee Beale" is actually BRANDON CHASE, a New-Orleans based producer whose credits include Barry Mahon's The Dead One (1961), four for the Morgue (1962), and Alligator (1980). He also ran Group 1 Film Distributors which fed grindhouses such Seventies sleaze as Crash!, Room of Chains, and Jailbait Babysitter. Digitally remastered from the original 35mm negative. — Handsome Harry Archer
GIRL IN TROUBLE (TRAILER)
BRANDON CHASE (1963)
VANGUARD PRODUCTIONS
2:31
USA
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