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The one cheerful movie in the series, Runaway Daughters, written by Charlie Haas, provides its own subversive commentary, lightheartedly undercutting a harsh plot about a girl (Julie Bowen) who believes herself pregnant and, in her search for the perpetrator, enlists the daring town rebel (Paul Rudd). How cool is this guy? "I like bein' bored," he mutters. The film also has a nice parody of the hectoring speech every movie parent had to endure in a '50s teen movie. "Do you people ever sit down and talk to your kids?" a righteous detective asks the frazzled moms and dads. "I mean, really talk to them about sex and sexual diseases -- about the strange night world of twisted kicks and weird rituals and equipment, the whips and chains and rubber balls and dildos and handcuffs." (Rubber balls?)
The other Rebel Highway films hunker down to more serious matters of turf marking and pubescent angst. Motorcycle Gang revs up real terror, as some wild ones kidnap a restless girl and her dad gets really mad. Roadracers is a hyperkinetic assault on good manners. Dragstrip Girl, a Cal-Mex remake of Rebel Without a Cause, stars Natasha Gregson Wagner (Natalie Wood's daughter) as a bored teen lured by a handsome Chicano's threat and thrill. Confessions of a Sorority Girl uncovers the black-satin double-dealing of a teen queen spurned. Girls in Prison, with a script co-written by raw-meat auteur Sam Fuller, is a taut, tart fable of betrayal in stir and out -- there's no difference, ladies.
The whole series revels in misanthropy; it parades the bullish stupidity of your average teenager, your average parent, your average everybody. The only things these movies romanticize are cars, cigarettes (each character smokes about three packs a minute) and the cliches of old teen pix. "Rumble at the playground tonight!" The young actors, children of the children of the '50s, might be speaking Old English, but they give the words an authentic spin. They know that the '50s was the cauldron in which the modern language of rebellion was forged.
The best thing about these movies is their acrid sting. They say the Eisenhower years were too complex to be remembered as just Hula-Hoops and hair grease. And that is fine with us old '50s types. When nostalgia is true, it hurts, man!