"13 Frightened Girls!" -1963.
Tagline: "The big fright! The eerie sight!" Pffttt......really? I don't think the person who made the poster saw
any part of this turkey!
Okay, let's get this over with....wait...what's that smell? Do you smell that? What
is that? Oh, damn it! I stepped in this movie! Oh, that sucks! Now I'm going to have to throw these shoes out because nothing could remove the stench of this God awful, boring, misleading, dull, trite, interminable, cloying, insipid, drudging, mundane, irksome, tedious and above all, spiritless abortion of a movie.
"How was it?", you ask? Absolutely nothing like the poster it advertises for, that's how. It was like William Castle just came unhinged one day and said "Hey! I know! Let's make a movie like 'Gidget',
only with spies and murders and teenage girls doing really, really stupid things!" At that point someone
should have shot Mr. Castle
in the leg with a spear gun to stop him from carrying out his nefarious plan. But noooooo....instead this....this thing was released on to the innocent public. I have no proof that "13 Frightened Girls!" effectively ended Castle's film career. There is no information I can find to prove this theory, but Castle went from films that made money and lasted the test of time, like "13 Ghosts"
and "House On Haunted Hill" to this crap that tanked. I know if I was bankrolling Castle I wouldn't have okayed enough money for him to buy a burrito after this.
"Plot" (okay, we'll call it that): There is a school in the Alps (somewhere)
that teaches the daughters of powerful politicians from all over the world. Yes, of course, enemies and allies all send their offspring to the same school, since they all speak English. *sigh* Anyway, because all the powerful men of the world only have daughters there isn't a boys school that is equally stupid. And, naturally, as a reward for getting the best mark in Latin, the head mistress allows a 16-year-old girl
to drive a bus filled with the daughters of the world's most powerful men down a steep mountain road! Of course! How stupid of me! And, naturally, a hairy tarantula, which are of course bountiful in the ALPS!.....crawls across the windshield,
causing the illegal driver to veer wildly all over. Eventually, she (the main character, Candy) slams on the brakes facing a mountain wall without actually hitting the wall. This, naturally, causes the windshield to splinter (!), crushing the Alpine Tarantula and also brings up the movie's title.
Now, right here I should have realised what was happening and that I had been duped. This was not only
not going to be scary, it was obviously going to be moronic. Anyway, the girls all go back to their respective embassies (which all just happen to be in London, because then they can all hang out together in their various embassies....like China
and Russia, because those countries got along so well with the U.S. in the 60's). Candy goes to the U.S. embassy, which is filled with spies and top secret crap, to visit her father.
For some reason it is necessary to make the audience feel even more uncomfortable, so Candy is shown to be madly in love with a 40 something year old spy named Wally.
I wouldn't even be slightly surprised to hear that Castle pitched a "Wally The Ugly Spy" movie to the executives at Columbia. Hopefully someone would have thrown a water glass at his head. But Wally has a girlfriend named "Soldier" (another spy...apparently no one could care less about politics in the embassies).
Wally used to entertain Candy with tales of his top secret adventures, because national security is merely a suggestion. That's okay, though, because Mike, the driver, has a setting on his radio that allows him to hear what is being said in the back behind the sound-proof glass.
That doesn't seem suspicious at all. Probably because Mike is a double agent known as "The Spider"! Ha! No "spoiler alert"! I did it on purpose! No one should have to see this movie. You'll thank me, one day. Anyway, long story short: Candy decides to become a spy and after visiting her friend
in the Chinese embassy (they're so nice!) she sneaks out and down a service elevator where she finds a dead guy in the meat cooler
with a U.S. embassy letter opener stuck in him. Naturally, being a 16-year-old girl, she calmly removes the letter opener and escapes with it, secretly giving it to Wally along with a letter made with cut-out letters and signed "Kitten".
Her father congratulates Wally on his use of the spy known as "Kitten" and Candy uses this as fuel to further her idiocy...I mean "spying". Candy/Kitten uses her friends as a means to enter each embassy, because all relatives of enemy countries are allowed free reign in the various embassies *sigh*. She finds out all kinds of crap and keeps reporting to Wally, who keeps using the information to thwart enemy activities. Wally doesn't know who Kitten is, but it gets out that the enemy operatives want him or her dead! Oh well! No big deal, in this movie. Tra la la la! Let's just go skipping along while people die around us! Blah, blah, blah and Candy gets found out by Wally.
Mike shows up bloody but still very much alive,
claiming Soldier has been taken by the Chinese. That part is true (even though he helped) and Candy sneaks off to turn herself over in exchange for Soldier's life.
Her Chinese friend throws down a doll from a window to tell her she will help her,
but changes her mind when Candy confesses she is the spy her Uncle (the ambassador) wants dead. Oh dear! My friend turned out to be using me to get information that could destroy my home country! How embarrassing! The oh-so-badly drawn Chinese tough guy
is about to throw Candy onto a meat hook (oh, please please please please!) when Wally somehow appears with a pistol and also somehow threatens three men at the same time.
These are the most cowardly spies ever! Wally gets Soldier and Candy out and returns to the U.S. Embassy. Mai Ling, the Chinese girl, gets slapped by her uncle ("High five!")
when he finds she has thrown the doll to Candy. It must have had something good in it. Candy goes back to school,
because whoever wrote this was running out of ideas. Mai Ling breaks into Candy's room
to get the doll back and a pitiful girl fight ensues, where the doll is broken and microfilm is found.
Candy takes the film and runs to the school's bus driver, looking to deliver the goods. But "The Spider" stabs the driver in the back,
which doesn't cause the young girl to scream or cry, of course. She tries to run but now the awkwardly out-of-date stereotypes from the Chinese embassy are trying to kill her. Oh dear! But, yay! Mai Ling has a change of heart and all the girls jump out of bed (still dressed in their school uniforms, of course) and confuse those silly Billies by pretending to be Candy and hiding in the basement with her!
Tee hee! What harmless fun! And only a few people had to die! Candy gets away and thinks she's safe when Mike picks her up in the Embassy-Approved car. He locks her in the back behind the not very sound-proof glass
and sets a time bomb inside the car. (I keep mine in the trunk.)
Upon Mike's escape, Wally plugs him and then rescues Candy.
We are treated to a thoroughly unrealistic and tremendously unsatisfying explosion. Oh God! Please let this be the end! Almost...almost....Wally and Candy's father come by the school to pick her up in a new non-exploded Embassy-Approved car driven by what we assume to be a non-double agent driver. Why? Well, it turns out that getting someone killed at your school is frowned upon and Candy and Mai Ling are being expelled.
(This, dear reader <no "s"> is as close to reality as we get). Chuckles ensue, however when Candy explains that there's an Embassy-Approved school in D.C.! Yuk, yuk, yuk! Please....God, Odin, Buddha or whoever....PLEASE let this be over! And it was! And I lived happily ever after, knowing I would never have to sit through this steaming pile of donkey manure ever again.
Things I learned from this movie: 1- William Castle is not to be trusted with my movie-going money.
My rating: On a scale of 1 to 10, it's a negative 9. I would rather sit in a chair made of used hypodermic needles and have a root canal THROUGH MY EYE SOCKET than sit through this again. To summarise, it wasn't very good.
Just so this wasn't a total waste of your time, I present "Guess That Mess" for your entertainment! Four pictures, but one is a cleverly disguised hoax! Get sniffing, detectives!
"Why Jaws?" you ask....well, Murray Hamilton, a very good character actor wasted in this movie, played the idiot doorknob Mayor Vaughn in "Jaws" and "Jaws 2" so I thought he deserved to be mentioned in a movie he was in that
couldn't suck a tennis ball through twenty feet of garden hose.
It's over. Let us never speak of this again.
