I had heard of Ed Wood from people in the past so I never looked for any of his movies.If people talk about him, he must suck.Boy was I ever right.I didn't search for this movie and didn't know it was a Wood movie until the opening credits.This movie takes place in a world where everyone has thirty foot high ceilings and a liquor stand/bar type thing.Everyone wears a suit, even when they are out committing crimes.They even put their tie back on before they leave jail when they get bailed out.The main character is a guy named Don Gregor and that's funny to me because I know a girl named Dawn Gregor.The only good thing in the movie happens rather early.We are treated to a great performance by a man in blackface.It has absolutely nothing to do with the story either.None of the characters where there watching him.It was blackface just for the fun of it.So Don's dad is a plastic surgeon who carries a house call bag with him.Because that makes sense.Anyway, Don and a friend decide to rob a theater late at night and of course the door is unlocked.His friend says the guard will know the combination to the safe.The only guard in the history of the world who would have the safe combination.And the guard does know it.Don kills the guard and you immediately hear police sirens.Then they get chased by the cops at a blistering twenty miles an hour and have no trouble eluding them.Even though no one saw who shot the guard, the radio news announces that Don did it.So Don goes to his dad's office in the middle of the night and dad and his secretary are there!Then the cops show up and they know everything.It was literally dark through the entire movie and everyone in the world was wide awake.Did I mention that there was lame flamenco guitar and piano in the background through the entire movie?As if that wasn't bad enough, the ending was even worse.And why does the DVD cover have a man with a bandaged face in a jail cell?That never even happened.Never see this.

Once upon a time we could take for granted the comforting homilies surrounding the wretched career of Edward D. Wood, Jr. In the 70s, his ghost wore the Golden Turkey crown unchallenged.Fast forward 30 or so years. The emergence of Home Video has literally thrown thousands of movies produced on similar budgets from that same time period in our lap. In comparison to his contemporaries, Ed's work doesn't look bad. Viewing Jail Bait from a pristine DVD transfer: the camera work, the lighting, editing, sound, script structure, blocking, use of location shooting - nothing glaringly inept about any of it. It is, in fact, above average for it's budget. Bride of the Monster would show even more improvement.Jail Bait is certainly not as inspired as Plan 9 or Glen or Glenda, but it is more technically assured than similar genre efforts directed by Hollywood veterans like William Beaudine for Monogram. It can sit on par with a decent television drama of the day and is more entertaining than the claptrap MGM released that year.As for the Cotton Watts and Chick sequence - this looks like it may have been some footage hacked from a completely different production that no one wanted. Ed probably acquired it for free and edited it in to pad the running time. It was common for budget-minded producers to chop-in all kinds of stock footage and even create subplots out of garbage swept from the cutting room floor.

This movie is a riot. I believe it is actually worse than Ed Wood's more famous classic "Plan 9 From Outer Space". This story is every bit as dumb as Plan 9 and the dialog is even worse - in fact it's a howl. I swear Ed Wood must have written this whole script in a day and never once looked back a second time at a line he had written. There are some really illogical parts to the plot here. 1. Why would the son of a famed plastic surgeon resort to being a stickup man when his wealthy father could give him anything he wanted in the whole world, easy as pie? 2. When the young man and his 'hardened criminal' pal are stealing the movie theater payroll (!) they get the night watchman to open the safe. Why on EARTH would a night watchman have the combination to the safe he is supposed to be guarding? What possible business could a night watchman have, opening a safe full of money he is guarding? It's ridiculous, but just another example of the depth of thought that went into this storyline. (When the young man and his criminal friend rob the theater, they relieve the night watchman of his holstered gun - and when they take it out, it looks like a little kid's tiny toy cap pistol, dwarfed against the holster. Hilarious.)3. At the end of the story the plastic surgeon grafts the face of his dead son onto the 'hardened criminal' so he will be arrested for murder. Other than that idiocy, amazingly the 'criminal' now has the height and build of the dead son! And everyone KNOWS that the face has been transplanted but no matter, that is the face of the guy who shot the watchman so the person who now HAS the face is the murderer! Ed Wood whipped these bizarre plot twists out left and right and seemed to think they were reasonable.4. The police detective asks the woman who works at the theater two or three times, is she SURE she saw Don Gregor actually shoot the night watchman, and she insists yes, she did. But she ran out of the room at least five seconds before the watchman was shot. There's no way she saw it happen!5. The watchman at the theater was a retired police officer who got 'bored' after he quit working so he took the job as the watchman. Yeah, that's a way to add some excitement to your life. Baby sit an empty building and a safe. Oh, and when he gets killed, even though he's just a night watchman now, it doesn't matter - the guys who killed him are COP killers.The musical background is also weird. The whole soundtrack consists of someone rapidly strumming a Flamenco guitar and someone playing random-yet-dramatic notes on a piano, no matter what is going on. The sets are stunningly cheap but the hardened criminal's girlfriend defends him to another woman by saying "Look around, does this stuff look cheap to you?" and the criminal himself points out how he has surrounded her with "all this luxury". The place looks just a cut or two above Ralph Kramden's apartment - totally cheap and spartan. Some luxury! And if I'm not mistaken, the tiny bungalow where the famous plastic surgeon lives is the same house Bela Lugosi walked out of in Plan 9, distraught over the death of his wife and "never to return." It's a pretty rinky-dink place for a famed plastic surgeon to live.Some great dialog lines from the movie: Marilyn Gregor: "You haven't failed, Dad!" Dr. Gregor: "Words, my daughter! Just words! The proof is in the FACT!"At the beginning of the payroll heist, with the watchman standing RIGHT IN FRONT OF the locked safe.... Watchman: "What safe? What combination?"Giving the police information of what she saw when the watchman was shot... Theater employee: "I'm afraid I wasn't very brave. I fainted early in the game."Sipping the drink his daughter made him.... Dr. Gregor: "Ahh. That's a good drink for a parched throat."Describing his phone call with the police... Dr. Gregor: "We had a long telephone conversation this afternoon, earlier in the day."Hoodlum Vic Brady bickering with his girlfriend: Brady: "He wants to give himself up!" Girlfriend "What?!" Brady: "What do I have to do, repeat myself all night? I said -" Girlfriend: "Yeah, yeah, I heard you. I heard you the first time." Brady: "Well then stop jibbering! I gotta think." Girlfriend: "What are you gonna do about it?" Brady: "Shut up!... Whaddya think it is I want to think about?"What else needs be said? It's a scream!

**SPOILERS** "Jail Bait" is Undoubtedly director Ed Wood's most conventional film compared to the deep and thought-provoking, in their hidden massages, and far out, in their subject matter, movies that he made during the course of his long film career. At first glance "Jail Bait" comes across as just an ordinary run of the mill cops and robbers black & white B-movie flick. That's until you get to it's totally unpredictable and nerve shattering ending. The film's surprise ending is so shocking as well as mind blowing that you have to watch it twice, not quite believing what you've seen the first time around, to get the full impact of it. The surprise ending is so utterly mind boggling that even the stone faced and unemotional future movie Hercules Steve Reeves,in the role of police Let. Bob Lawrence, had his jaw drop to the floor with his handsome face, losing control of its facial muscles, distorting to the point where Mr. Reeves became almost unrecognizable!Young and out of control Don Gregor, Clancy Malone, got in a bit over his head by hooking up with career criminal Vic Brady, Timothy Farrell, who involved him in a number of stick ups as his not too skillful partner in crime. It's when the two held up the Monterey Theater that things started to really unravel. Don panicking, when he heard police sirens, shot and killed the theater's elderly night watchman Paul McKenna, Bud Osborne. Making a run for it the two hold-up men were spotted by the theater manager's secretary Miss. Willis, Mona McKinnon, who saw Don shoot and kill the night watchman. As things turned out McKenna was a retired cop making Don not only an armed robber but a cop killer as well!Going to see his father the renowned plastic surgeon Dr. Boris Gregor, Herbert Rawlinson, Don is told to give himself up and face the music, which can very possibly be a one way trip to the San Quantin gas chamber, by taking responsibility for his crime. Before Don can give himself up he's shot and killed by his partner Vic Brady, who felt that he'll turn him over to the police, whom he came over to say goodbye to. It's then that Brady comes up with this ingenious plan to have Don's father rearrange his mug, or face, where no one at the scene of the robbery and cop shooting at the Monterey Theater could possibly identify him!With Don's body now deep sixth at the bottom of the lake and nobody knowing that he's dead Brady and his loyal, despite his constantly abusing her, gun moll Loretta, Theodora Thurman, trick Dr. Gregor together with his daughter Marilyn (Dolores Fulle), who also happens to be his nurse, to operate on him if he ever want's to see his son, and Marilyn's brother, alive again!***SPOILERS*** Even though the film "Jail Bait" was pretty interesting up to the point of Brady's operation the out of the blue ending was the cherry on top of the birthday cake. With Let. Lawrence and his boss Insp. Jones, Lyle Talbot, unexpectedly coming on the scene of the great unveiling, Brady's new face, the results was just too shocking for them, as you well could imagine Brady, to absorb! Not to say the least for the audience who were, like everyone on screen, totally unprepared for it!P.S Actor Herbert Rawlinson who played Dr. Boris Gregor replaced the great Bela Lugosi for the part in that Mr. Lugosi was not available in him being in drug rehab, Bela was addicted on heroin, at the time the movie was being filmed. "Jail Bait" also happened to be Rawlinson last movie appearance in him suddenly passing away on July 12, 1953 the very day that he completed his scenes in the film!