Sixteen

This here is a low budget gem. I won't spoil the story,you'll have to watch it ! Let's just say a sweetly naive,very poor country family go to the state fair and things get rocky. Funny in oh-so-many ways,my words cannot do it justice. The music ranges from cringeworthy to bad to pretty darn good,there is quite a dichotomy and range in the music. You just gotta see it !

I watched trailer for this and decided it couldn't be as bad as it appeared. Wrong. This is listed as "drama" I guess because there is no"waste if time" category. I may have seen this (sort of) film in a double feature at a drive-in on a date. That's because the story, the dialogue and the acting were so bad that you didn't miss anything if you only concentrated on your date. There are a ton of filler scenes, and overly long reaction shots of mostly the entire cast just staring at each other instead of saying anything. The ending is just as stupid as the rest of the film. Weren't there statutory rape laws back in the 70s?

my current girlfriend was in the movie as an extra.she lived in Georgia at the time.the film was awful.in her scene she was supposed to look at one of the other actors up and down when he walked into the bar.she was also had dance scene.the actor she was supposed to look at was the one who played the stunt rider at the carnival.i have been looking for this movie for some time now to surprise her.my wife tells me that the actor who played the stunt rider wanted her to be his point of view.she tells me they had to do three or four takes on that scene.the stunt riders point of view was supposed to be on the young girl who was SIXTEEN.after the scene was completed the actor said he wished that she was his point of view.

This was part of a strange cycle of early 70's movies focusing on rural Southern hillbillies--"hicks-ploitation" flicks you might call them. Some of the bigger-budgeted ones, like "Walking Tall", were serious and more or less realistic, while others, like some of the films of Roger Corman or Russ Meyers were more exploitative and melodramatic , while others still, like "Country Cuzzins" were flat-out Harry Novakesque softcore porn "comedies". It's hard to say where this oddity fits in. It has kind of a Southern Gothic feel to it like a William Faulkner or Flannery O'Connor morality tale about a family of poor hillbillies who come into money and are approached by every local con artist from used car salesmen to drunken preachers, but eventually end up at a fair (Vanity Fair, perhaps?) where they are preyed on by carnival folk in a long surreal, largely dialgue-free sequence that were so popular in the era (i.e. "Runaway, Runaway" or "The Pick-Up").

There are certainly some exploitative scenes. There's a really strange scene early on, for instance, where the older brother and sister run off hand-in-hand and go skinny-dipping in a particularly filthy-looking pond while hippy-dippy early seventies music plays. I think this is supposed to show the innocence of the characters. But while the actors are not voluptuous "Lil Abner"-esquire caricatures typically found in these kinds of movies, they don't really look "sixteen" either, let alone as young and impossibly naive as they act. It is mostly this pair that is preyed at the carnival--and mostly sexually of course--but (for better or worse) this movie really fails up to live up to its lurid alternate title "The Young Prey".

At times the movie seems to be trying to be a comedy such as when the mother tells a town magistrate that she named her oldest son J.C., not after Jesus Christ, but because there was a sale at J.C. Penney's the week he was born. The comedy falls flat though usually and the movie falls back on it's generic early 70's weirdness. (Of course, I LIKE early 70's weirdness, but others may prefer a movie with more broad comedy and hillbilly sex). The only recognizable star is Mercedes McCambridge, who appeared in several European Jess Franco films AND provided Linda Blair's demonic voice in "The Exorcist". The older daughter is played by a pretty enough actress (even if she won't make anyone forget about "Daisy Mae Clampet" or "Daisy Duke" ). The youngest son called "Brother" looks vaguely familiar and I think was an early 70's TV actor. But I've said enough. Check this out if it sounds interesting to you.

Well, I have never seen this movie, but I know something about it as well. It was filmed on my family's property in South Georgia. My cousin was held by the lady that played the mother in the movie. My mom told me my great grandparents were not happy when they heard that there were nude scenes being shot in the creek and it was between a "brother and sister." The creek and pond or whatever was/is our land. My aunt bought this movie to see if you could see my grandfather's mill house, but I don't think she was successful. It is really neat that my family was part of this movie, but it is sad that the movie was so bad and so trashy. My family is nothing like the family depicted in the movie and it really upset them that the movie portrayed people from the South in that manner. I just wanted to add my two cents in.