YMMV / The Violent Years

• Ending Fatigue: The final half of the Dénouement basically consists of the judge ramming his philosophy down the throats of Paula's parents for the remainder of the runtime. It doesn't help that the movie starts with him doing the same thing before we flashback to see how everyone ended up in court.
• Glurge: Pay attention to your kids or they'll turn into murderous deviants.
• Informed Wrongness: The parents are touted as being neglectful of Paula, but their behavior on screen seems to belie Paula (and the writer's) claims of them.
  • While the mother is fairly aloof, she does give Paula blank checks, and free use of her car, without qualifications. She is claimed to never be interested in Paula, but she actually does show concern for Paula's desires, and has a long conversation with her.
  • Similarly, her father is portrayed as being married to his job and never being home for Paula. Yet, her father did give her gifts, and even more importantly, is supportive and knowledgeable of Paula's school and civic activities. To take that even further, he's actively proud of her.
• Moral Event Horizon: The gang casually raping a victim after robbing him, completely on a whim. It helps that the movie doesn't pull any of the Double Standard tropes and plays it straight as sexual assault under the threat of murder.
• She Really Can Act: Playboy centerfold Jean Moorhead does pretty well in her first (and last) major role.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Paula is treated as a Tragic Villain driven to crime by Parental Neglect. They really just seem only slightly inattentive, which makes Paula's complaints absurdly trivial, especially considering the severity of the crimes she commits for no other reason than thrills or attention.
• Values Resonance: One of the movie's more famous scenes has Paula and company gang-rape a man. Notably, this is not played for laughs or titillation; it's treated as just as horrifying as it would be if the genders were reversed, with the victim genuinely traumatized and the crime being portrayed in-universe as one of the perpetrators' most evil deeds. In an era of female-on-male sexual assault being increasingly understood as no less terrible than the other way around, this notable early aversion of the usual double standards has been singled out as genuinely praiseworthy and ahead of its time.

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