What makes it different from others?

just watch it!

Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

So I'm watching the flick, and I start thinking to myself - Good grief, did people actually pay good money to watch stuff like this back in the Forties? Yeah, I know, admission was probably only about a quarter at best, but still, you could have had a couple sodas at the malt shop. Straight out of the exploitation/educational film camp, "Delinquent Daughters" attempts to instruct and admonish parents for the 'Alarming Increase of Juvenile Delinquency' as touted in a newspaper headline quote from J. Edgar Hoover. I have a pretty good idea that none of the genre's films had much impact regarding their intended mission, other than the covert one of titillation and cheap thrills.As far as this one goes, it's pretty uneven in both the acting and production values. The print I viewed from the Mill Creek Entertainment set of 'Cult Classics' was of questionable quality; it was easy to pick out the night time scenes because they all looked like they were filmed completely in the dark. The story follows the off screen set up of a high school girl suicide, and goes on to explore the antics of various teenagers, none of whom seem to feel any remorse for the dead teen, who one describes as 'a nice girl but no angel'. It would have seemed more appropriate if the picture explored the angst these high schoolers felt over the death of a friend, but it seems she didn't have one.Hey, how about that Jerry (Jimmy Zahner), all worked up over the gun point robbery he pulled at the grocery store. He got away with $2.80!!! Who wrote this? And you can't beat old Rocky's (Johnny Duncan) logic in trying to convince June (June Carlson) to marry him - Martha Washington was only sixteen when she got married, and she wound up with a president! I guess the highlight, as a number of other reviewers have pointed out, was old Judge Craig's (Frank McGlynn) speech to gathered teens and parents alike noting that the proper attention and discipline might have prevented all the bad things from happening in their kids' lives. More simplistic than compelling, one comes away with a feeling of 'Yeah, right', just as the scene dissolves into a decade early preview of American Bandstand to provide a happy ending. Not one of the better flicks in the 'Cult Classics' collection, you might want to check out one of their drug, sex or alcohol treatments instead.

(Some Spoilers) Straight out of todays-Summer of 1944-newspaper headlines the film "Delinquent Daughters" focus on the epidemic of juvenile crime that's was sweeping the country during the war years in the early and mid 1940's.We have this local hood and his moll Nick Gordon & Mimi, Jon Dawson & Fifi D'Orsay, running this teenage watering hole, supposedly serving soda pop and milkshakes to its under aged customers, the Merry-Go-Round Cafe. The Merry-Go-Round is instead getting the teenagers both juiced up, on hard liqueur, and doing Nick's and Mimi's dirty work. It's when local high school girl Lucille Dillerton is found drowned and boozed up after she jumped off a pier that the police headed by J.Edger Hoover look-alike Det. Hanahan, Joe Devlin, start to put the screws on Nick & Mimi's joint.With Nick just too slick to get caught with the goods on him all Det. Hanahan could do is wait for him to make a mistake. That's exactly what happens when Nick starts to make eyes on pretty and well stacked high school girl Sally Higgins, Teala Loring. It's Sally's boyfriend Jerry Syker, Jimmy Zahner,who's been knocking off bars gas stations and groceries for Nick who split the take, 90% for Nick and 10% for Jimmy, with him. Jimmy got the sh*t end of the stick, in the money he robbed, even though he was the one who put his a** on the line doing the robberies and at the same taking an eager, looking for both action and excitement, Sally along with him on his crime spree.It's when Mimi is brought into police headquarters for questioning that Let. Hanahan drops a bombshell about her cheating boyfriend Nick Gordon planning to drop her for the much younger and sexier Sally Higgins. Sally's boyfriend Jerry had earlier participated in a payroll robbery with Nick where he and a security guard were shot and killed. Now seeing that there's a future, in crime, for her with Nick Sally willingly replaced Mimi as Nick's new squeeze. Mad as hell Mimi not only implicates Nick in the string of robberies including a number of murders, one of a cop, in and around town but confronts her ex-lover Nick and her replacement, Sally, at the Merry-Go-Round-Cafe.After getting into a vicious eye scratching and hair pulling cat fight with Sally Mimi ends up getting belted by Nick who then together with Sally take off in his car away from the perusing, and now on to Nick & Sally, police headed by Let. Hanahan. The movie ends with teenagers June Tompson and her boyfriend and soon to be husband Rocky Webster, June Carlson & Johnny Duncan, forcing Nick off the road. Nick and his new love Sally end up at the bottom of a cliff crushed and burned to a crisp.Unlike Jerry and Sally June and Rocky didn't fall for Nick's boastful promises of making them rich and famous, or better yet infamous. The two youngsters not only stayed away from Nick's criminal activities but did what they could to both prevent and put an end to them.Besides the hooky dialog and bad acting the movie had some of the worst lighting you'll ever see, or not see, in a motion picture! Even in an extremely low budgeted turkey like "Delinquent Daughters". There were a number of scenes in the movie that looked like they were filmed in the bottom of a two mile mine shaft with the miners helmet-lights batteries having gone dead!

This is a bad movie that purports to be an educational film designed to warn America about the menace of teenagers running amok thanks to uninvolved parents. However, like almost all the so-called "educational" films of the 30s and 40s, it was really a shabby little film designed to be snuck past the censors of the Hays Office. In 1934, the major studios all agreed to abide by the dictates of a stronger Production Code--eliminating sex, nudity, cursing and "inappropriate" plots in films (these had actually been relatively common in films in the early 30s). However, in an effort to sneak in smut, small studios created films to shock adults when they learn about terrible social ills, though they were REALLY intended to titillate and slip adult themes past the censors! Such films as MARIJUANA, MAD YOUTH, REEFER MADNESS and SEX MADNESS were all schlocky trash that skirted past the boards because they were supposedly educational. Even though they were laughably bad, they also made money due to low production costs and because they often offered nudity, violence and sordid story lines--all in the name of education! Unlike many of these films, DELINQUENT DAUGHTERS didn't have nudity, but it sure had lots of sleazy story elements that were sure to titillate. In this film, teens drank, used drugs, committed pointless robberies and assaults and drove like maniacs--all apparently the result of poor parental guidance. And as a result, kids died in this movie--and in the most spectacular ways! The acting and writing were almost universally bad, though the sequence where the judge tells off the parents of these punks actually was amazingly good--too bad everything else was pretty lousy. In fact, one character was so bad, so annoying and so gosh-darn awful, I nominate the ditsy blonde as the most annoying character of the 1940s--she was THAT bad!! Her voice was more grating than Olive Oyl's and she was practically sub-human in her stupidity!

1st watched 1/22/2007 - 3 out of 10(Dir-Albert Herman): Mediocre, at best, juvenile teenager drama which starts at the onset of a high school girl killing herself with the authorities trying to find out why. Of course, the kids remaining aren't much help as they were all out partying together the night before and don't want their parents to find out. None of the kids show much sympathy, which appears to be the point of the movie -- if you're a bad girl and party you lose all your sensitivity. Although later in the movie, the tables turn and the parents are shown to blame -- which was a nice turn(with a good scene with the judge helping the parents understand where they were going wrong), but it comes too late in the movie(about ¾ of the way thru). For the most part the acting is pretty bad and the lighting on some scenes is so horrible that you can barely tell what's going on(this may have just been the age of the movie, though). Besides this, the movie tries hard from a story perspective, but turns out to be pretty much a snoozer that you're just waiting on to end.