'Candy' Hall (a toothy Kathy Dunn), the teen-age daughter of an American diplomat, becomes embroiled in espionage when she overhears details of an international plot while visiting her friend Mai-Ling (a cute Lynne Sue Moon), the niece of a diplomat from 'Red China' (Khigh Dhiegh). Candy is one of a cohort of diplomats' daughters (the titular "Girls") and when she starts feeding information gleaned from her friends' gossip-sessions to an American spy, she promptly becomes 'Kitten', an anonymous intelligence-asset sought by agents from both sides of the 'Bamboo Curtain'. Produced and directed by William Castle, well known for gimmicky promotions, the film's publicity campaign claimed that the "13" girls (oddly, there are actually 15) were recruited from the various countries they represented, including countries on the 'other side' in the Cold War (although this was not always true, Moon was a born in England). Other than Candy and Mai-ling, the girls have few to no lines and are never "Frightened". The cast is fine for what is expected of them in a light-weight teeny-bopper comedy-thriller but the plot is simplistic and full of implausibilities (even by the forgiving standards of a fluffy farce). The 13 (15) girls' big moment is a silly scene in which, all dressed in their identical school-uniforms, they gigglingly confuse, then swarm, a pair of Chinese assassins (comedic shtick at odds with the preceding scene, the knife-murder the school's avuncular bus driver). Lacking the appealing other-worldly silliness of Castle's canon of gimmick-laden horror-lite flicks, '13 Frightened Girls' is really only of interest as a pop-culture flashback to the cold-war or to dedicated fans of the 'guru of gimmicks'.
Review of 13 Frightened Girls
