cult film freak: JUNE KENNEY, FAY SPAIN AND JOHN BRINKLEY IN 'TEENAGE DOLL'

Title: TEENAGE DOLL Year: 1957 Rating: ***1/2

The opening scene in Roger Corman's 1957 girl-gang melodrama TEENAGE DOLL feels like you walked in ten minutes late... as The Black Widows leader Fay Spain is explaining to her underlings about what happened to one of their own girls, lying already dead outside a dark warehouse...

Turns out it was an uptight goody-goody who somehow committed the murder, and, hiding in the shadows, June Kenney's listening to the conversation, knowing these tough young locals are now after her...

June Kenney in TEENAGE DOLL with John Brinkley

As the exposition dialogue peaks when scene-stealing gang-leading rival John Brinkley, inside his own turf's warehouse outside of a rumble-centered junkyard, provides the kind of scene-stealing monologue that would be common in the next decade's actor's workshop era...

And while it's a stretch that gorgeous little blonde beauty June Kenney would have been attracted to such an antagonistic character, the most effective sequences have little to do with the murdered-girl plot-line...

Sandra Smith in TEENAGE DOLL

When second-act vignettes are traded off between the gang, with each girl alone in their own separate examples of squalor-ridden family problems: including bad attitude white girl Sandra Smith, vulnerable Spanish girl Ziva Rodann, local cop's daughter Barbara Wilson and Barboura Morris alongside Collette Jackson, two bickering polar-opposite sisters deserving their own spinoff...

And while resilient leader Fay Spain needed at least one hunter vs hunted sequence with petite TEENAGE DOLL June Kenney, there's enough surprisingly effective character-driven performances to make this gangland programmer superior to most 1950's delinquent-youth melodramas.