Damaged Goods / The Hard Road (Special Edition)

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I give Damaged Goods 3 stars, merely for its value as a historical curiosity. It has a very silly soap opera plot, and is very weak as a warning film. A girl gets jealous of her boyfriend because his best friend's girlfriend wants to steal him from her. So she dumps him, allowing the hussy to make passes at him. However, they make up. So his friend gets him drunk, he gets VD, she dumps him again, he takes up with his friend's girlfriend, he makes up with his old girlfriend and dumps his new squeeze, the end. Not what you would expect from Sid Davis, the master of paranoid, alarmist warning films for kids (surprisingly, no little children get killed by nameless strangers, a problem that occurs in pretty well every other Sid Davis film).

The Hard Road on the other hand is priceless. As Something Weird suggests, it is like every single warning film ever made has been combined into one alarming film. The lead female manages to go directly from one problem to another. Just when...

Exploitation films designed to scare teeangers out of having sex
Let me begin with this specific warning: One of the things that "Damaged Goods" and "The Hard Road" have in common is that during the course of the narratives the young people in the movies and the viewing audience are exposed to what were called sex hygiene films. The point of these "educational" films was to scare kids straight and that means showing pictures of genitalia infected with venereal disease. So if you think that this Something Weird DVD has brought together a couple of choice examples from the sexploitation genre of the early 1960s, you are going to be in for a rude awakening, which, of course, was the whole point of these films.

The trailer for "Damaged Goods" makes it seem that the title character of this 1961 film is Kathy Durham (Dolores Faith), the bad brunette high school girl who wants to take Jim Radman (Mory Schoolhouse) away from perky blonde Judy Jackson (Charlotte Stewart). But Jim is really the central character here and the title fits him as...

Great time capsule!
My 5-star rating is for the first film, "Damaged Goods." This is a highly atmospheric film that is very nostalgic for anyone who remembers the 1960s. The hair, clothes, cars and music are a refreshing break from the un-ending grunge of post 1970-America.

"Damaged Goods" is a day in the life of handsome Jim (Mory Schoolhouse), his buddy Monk (Michael Bell) and the fun everybody has when bad girl Kathy (Dolores Faith) rocks the boat by taking Jim away from his squeaky-clean girlfriend Judy (Charlotte Stewart).

High points: Double-dating at a teen juke joint as Judy fumes over Kathy's obvious come-ons to Jim and Monk; Kathy cleverly acing Judy out of the picture so she can go with Jim and Monk to the fun-fair; boys night out with Jim, Monk and two buddies as they latch on to some hookers; and Kathy's delight when annoyingly wholesome Judy finds out Jim got lucky with a ho in Seaview, wrecking their relationship.

Yes, this was made as a warning film and...

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