A lot of the Poverty Row B movies can be fun to watch in part because they're so nuts, but also because they're so short: if you don't like them, it's not as if you've wasted too much of your time. Recently I watched another such movie, the exploitation frilm Mad Youth.
The "youth" in question is Marian Morgan, played by Mary Ainslee, who was about 25 when the movie was made but playing about 18. (There's no shots of high school, but Marian is considered old enough to marry without parental consent.) She lives with her divorcée mother Lucy (Betty Compson), both of them surviving on the money they get from the ex-husband, which is presumably substantial, since she can call up the "escort" service and get them to send a date of sorts over to accompany her to her bridge game. Mom wants Marian to go over to her friend Helen's house to spend the night, but Marian is horrified: Helen lives with an incredibly old-fashioned granny.
So as a compromise, Marian is allowed to invite her "good" friends over, although of course her friends are the sort who enjoy entertaining themselves in a way that's scandalous for 1939 but fairly tame today. They dance the jitterbug, while some play strip poker! Eventually Mom comes home with her companion, the "Count" DeHoven. Apparently he's supposed to be a young, dashing sort of count, because Marian immediately falls for him and start dating, which really pisses off Mom who is still trying to pass herself off as 28.
The Count and Marian start double dating on the sly with Helen and one of her boyfriends that she's not serious about, since she's been corresponding with a man she's never actually seen before. Eventually we learn that Helen has been climbing out the window to get away from Grandma, who herself figures out what's going on. So Helen decides that she's going to run off and elope, since the alternative is to go live with her uncle on a farm in Iowa. Yeah, the plot, such as it is, gets nuts. And it's only going to get more nuts.
Marian's mom reads Marian's diary, where she learns about the dates Marian has been going on with the Count, as well as learning of Marian's disappointment that the Count just ghosts her for reasons, not that they used the term "ghosting" back in 1939. Marian decides to go off to visit her friend Helen, only to find that Helen is not in fact married but that the correspondence dating was in fact a front for "white slavery"!
Fortunately, the story ends more or less happily, with the young people learning a valuable moral lesson, which was theoretically the point of a movie like Mad Youth. In fact, the real point was to try to slip in as much luridness as they could get away with while making that point. In the case of Mad Youth, it's actually a pretty tame movie by the standards of 2026. But it's some of the attempts to be shocking that are fun, as Mad Youth is a fairly ridiculous movie. The highlight is probably the nightclub "bull fight", with the matador basically made up like a clown and a dog with bull horns acting as the bull and "goring" the matador in the groin on multiple occasions. It's so off the wall that it's fun.
Also, Mad Youth only runs 63 minutes, so if you don't care for it, well, it's not as if you would have been doing something useful with that hour of your life, is it? I've seen much worse.
