The Prime Time

The Prime Time (1960)

* (out of 4)

Really bad film about Jean Norton (JoAnn LeCompte), a teenage girl who wants to break free from her wimpy parents and become an adult. How does she do this? She starts off by sneaking out of the house and then it turns to meeting older men. Before long Jean is dealing with a photographer who (gasp) wants her to be in the nude.

THE PRIME TIME is a pretty bland and boring movie that for years was credited to Herschell Gordon Lewis. He wrote the screenplay and worked on the film but the director credited was Gordon Weisenborn. I'm not sure if Lewis eventually took over the shooting or what but there's no doubt that this is a pretty bad exploitation picture that really doesn't have too much going for it.

Thankfully the film only ran 72-minutes but even that seemed extremely long. The basic story dealing with the teenage girl really wasn't anything new since these type of warning pictures had been around since the 1930's. The added bonus here is that there are some scenes with girls skinny dipping and we get a lot of nudity. These scenes appear to have been shot at a separate time and edited into another picture. Perhaps Lewis shot these scenes? I'm not sure but the non-stop nudity during these scenes does make the picture stand out for something made in 1960.

LeCompte really isn't all that interesting as an actress and there's never a time where she makes you feel anything towards the character. It's worth noting that Karen Black has a small role here and according to producer David F. Friedman she did a bunch of nude scenes but her agent paid to have them taken out of the film!

Jo Ann LeCompte plays Jean Norton, a 17-year-old wild child in too much of a hurry to "grow up". She basically *uses* her supposed "boyfriend" Tony (James Brooks) while making time with police detective Mack McKeen (Frank Roche). Tony takes it upon himself to investigate when, at one point, Jean goes missing.

A somewhat forgotten credit for the legendary "Godfather of Gore", writer-producer Herschell Gordon Lewis, this has earned some curiosity value for being the film debut for a very young Karen Black. However, her fans should be aware that she's really barely in the picture, playing minor roles: a dancer and an art model. Mostly, it's a vehicle for Ms. LeCompte, who's fairly watchable. Overall, the film is a decent enough but unexceptional exploitation-melodrama that will merit a viewing from some interested parties due to brief female nudity. But the story is nothing special. Ray Gronwold plays the antagonist, a sleazy painter dubbed The Beard....because he's got a beard. That should give you an idea of the quality of the writing, although there are *some* priceless lines here and there. Maria Pavelle is endearing as Gloria, Tony's loyal gal pal who we can all tell is better for him than Jean. For a while, Jean is not really a character worth caring about, and you have to wonder why Tony would bother going to such lengths, although she *does* become more sympathetic in the closing dozen minutes or so.

The quality of the black & white photography can be very murky, and the loud, incessant soundtrack almost threatens to drown out the dialogue at times. But curious viewers may want to give this one a look, if only for the sake of being HGL / Karen Black completists.

Five out of 10.

Director Herschel Gordon Lewis is, of course, most famous for his "gore" movies like "Blood Feast", "2000 Maniacs", and "The Wizard of Gore". While I find these films pretty overrated, his stuff outside the "gore" genre like "Year of the Yahoo" or "She Devils on Wheels" is often downright unwatchable. So I was pleasantly surprised by this entertaining JD (juvenile delinquent) movie Lewis made very early in his career. Uber-voluptuous man-eater Virginia LeCompte plays perhaps the most unconvincing "seventeen year old" in the history of cinema. She convinces her parents to let her go out with nice guy "Tony", but then borrows his car to rendezvous with her real boyfriend, an older, corrupt police detective at the home of a beatnik paint/sex offender called "the Beard" who her cop beau is shaking down. The heroine gets herself in trouble after agreeing to pose nude for "the Beard", so for some reason her would-be boyfriend/sap "Tony", "Marie", a girl who is in love with him, and all their friends rush to the rescue of this obnoxious, ridiculously overaged "juvenile" before her "virginity" (yeah, right) is jeopardized.

The plot is ridiculous, but in a very entertaining way. Like a lot of 50's JD and beatnik movies this contains a lot of laughably ripe dialgue ("You're transmittin', but I'm not receivin'--you dig, daddy-o?"). There's also some entertaining rock songs by a live band including the theme song "The Prime Time" and "Teenage Tiger" ("She's a teenage tiger/Got the devil inside her"). There's a gratuitous flashback catfight scene between the heroine and another ridiculously mature-looking "teenage" girl (they hilariously roll around on the ground in poodle skirts clawing at each other's faces). Lewis does a good (i.e. competent) job directing this film, which very much anticipates thematically the later, more famous exploitation film "Scum of the Earth" he did with David Friedman and "Color Me Blood Red", one of his later gore films about another deranged--but much more murderous--painter.

Karen Black has an early don't-blink-or-you'll-miss-it part here. I don't know if I buy the story that she had nude scenes that were cut out. JD films of this era typically had a lot of exploitation elements, but they never had nudity, and this movie was made a year or two before Lewis and Friedman had gotten involved in any "nudie-cutie"-type stuff. Besides if you want to see Karen Black naked--or for that matter Karen Black in actual ROLE--you'd be much better advised to watch one of her later movies. This is not great, but it's pretty entertaining