William Castle sure loved a gimmick.  His best movies were often accompanied by ones like the buzzers under seats for select screenings of The Tingler.  For 1963’s 13 Frightened Girls, attendees were given a card to lick which revealed the phrase “Don’t get caught in the candy web”.  Yeah, that’s what I want to do at the movies, lick something that has been handed out by somebody who probably doesn’t wash their hands after using the bathroom.

That text makes more sense when one learns this picture was titled The Candy Web in most territories outside the U.S.  Of the two titles, the one outside the U.S. makes a bit more sense as the central character is Candace, or “Candy”, who is played by Kathy Dunn.  I guess she is one of the 13 frightened girls, though there are actually more than 13 young women here and only a couple of them will be frightened at any point in the runtime.  Even then, they aren’t scared for very long.

All of them are the daughters of diplomats and they are the sole attendees of a special school.  To impress an older man on whom she has a crush, she decides to spy on her peers and provide him the secrets of the nations they represent.  That man is Murray Hamilton, so I want you to imagine a teenage girl crushing on the mayor of Amity. 

He is an American agent working in London, and that information will be as much of a benefit to him as it will put her in danger.  Her father is Hamilton’s boss, and he is played by Hugh Marlowe.  Rounding out the adult leads is Joyce Taylor as a fellow spy named Soldier, which made me wonder what happened to Tinker.  In a lesser role is Khigh Dhiegh, as a deadly spy based out of the Chinese embassy.  If you recall him from anything, it is likely from The Manchurian Candidate, and he exercises the same devious charm here.

One aspect of this picture that is deeply frustrating is we hardly see Dunn do anything.  The are montages of her acting sneaky and mysterious notes composed of cut-up newspapers arriving in Hamilton’s hands, but these merely suggest action.  The only real action we see involving her is when she abuses the trust of friend Lynne Sue Moon to sneak around the Chinese embassy, which is where she discovers a dead man in the freezer, a letter opener from the U.S. embassy stuck in the man’s chest.  In a surprising bit of ugliness later, Dunn also nearly ends up impaled on a meat hook, ala Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Another scene before that was also quite unpleasant, when Dunn seduces her way into the apartment of Garth Benton’s ostensibly Dutch student, correctly suspecting him of being a Russian agent.  While he is getting her a ginger ale, she secretly takes photos of contents of his suitcase.  She’s still doing that when he happens to see this from the doorway to the kitchen.  He decides to roofie her with the pill that was already in his hand.  Now, he had no reason to suspect her of anything ulterior motives before this, so what did he have mind before then?

Benton is not the only guy behaving inappropriately.  Hamilton’s character would today end up on some sort of list, given how often he talks about how much Dunn should be spanked.  Consider this line from the man: “I ought to turn you around and spank you until my hand falls off.”  Then there’s this exchange between Dhiegh and Hamilton: “And the spanking—administer it with vigor!”  “I definitely shall!”  It is hard to believe this was ever acceptable, yet this is allegedly kids’ entertainment.

Perhaps it is the potential for spanking which prompts school headmistress Norma Varden in the first scene to advise the girls to “hold onto your dignity” while on vacation.  Any hopes of dignity for the picture are dashed immediately after this as Dunn crashes the school bus when a tarantula, one far from its normal habitat, appears on the windshield.  Dunn had apparently won the privilege of driving to the airport after winning a Latin contest, and I am confused by every aspect of this.  Gina Trikonis, as the Russian girl, says, “A dead language is not worth dying for”, which is the funniest line in the script by some distance.

I’m not sure who the intended audience was for this picture, but it is an insult to them.  This is twice as true if anybody Asian is watching, as Moon has a deeply thankless role.  Dunn rolls her eyes whenever this alleged friend of hers talks about anything of personal interest to her.  Like so many pictures of the time, generic “oriental” music accompanies Moon almost every time she’s on the screen.  Dunn, in a way, doesn’t fare much better, and has a bizarre bit of accompaniment when she descends a staircase at one point, a bit of score I can only describe as “mincing down the stairs”.  And don’t get me started on “Three Blind Mice” inexplicably recurring on the soundtrack as if it was symbolic of anything.

This is also a deeply stupid film, with such baffling elements as the door to the basement of the girls’ school being able to be boarded shut from the inside.  Like how so many films gloss over Africa as if the continent was a single country, this one has the line “Do want to start a war with all of South America?”  That is in a scene where Dunn meddles in the romances of German girl Ilona Schütze if only because, frankly, Dunn’s character is quite an asshole.  One could say she demonstrates agency by gathering intel on her own, but really that is just more selfishness and recklessness on her part.  If anything, she is a sociopath.

In addition to the cards I mentioned in the opening paragraph, 13 Frightened Girls had a second gimmick.  In some of the countries from which alleged representatives of it appear, the prints specific to that reason would have their girl driving the bus instead of Dunn in the opening scene.  That is pretty clever, though advertising for each region positioning its representative as the start of the picture is misleading.  That is an odd bait-and-switch though, given the script’s weird mini-obsession with spanking Dunn, I think it is more jailbait-and-switch.

Dir: William Castle

Starring Kathy Dunn, Murray Hamilton, Joyce Taylor

Watched as part of Powerhouse/Indicator UK (region B) blu-ray boxed set William Castle at Columbia, Volume Two