Just about the only things that remotely redeem this movie are the solid acting performances by the principals, who make the most of the one-dimensional material given them.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
Los Angeles Times by Gene Seymour
Skip it. Just fill in the blanks and you too can brew the same bland, goopy mixture, right down to such clunker lines as "There is a Santa Claus, Ma. He just doesn't come to Brooklyn anymore."
New York Daily News by Jack Mathews
Deuces Wild is the worst thing to have happened to Brooklyn since the Ice Age severed it from the mainland.
Director Scott Kalvert returns to wring every last cliché out 1950s juvenile delinquent movies, without adding anything particularly fresh to the formula.
The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Liam Lacey
Brainless, but enjoyably over-the-top, the retro gang melodrama, Deuces Wild represents fifties teen-gang machismo in a way that borders on rough-trade homo-eroticism.
Austin Chronicle by Marjorie Baumgarten
Would have been smart to fold before it let its hand go this far.
A repellent orgy of gratuitous violence and hackneyed melodrama, Deuces Wild marks a grim nadir for everyone involved, including late cinematographer John A. Alonzo (Chinatown, Harold & Maude), who deserved a much better swan song.
Miami Herald by Rene Rodriguez
At the very least, Corman would have remembered to make the movie fun.
It's so uncomplicated you could go out for spaghetti after the first 10 minutes and slip back into your seat just in time for the last 10, and you wouldn't feel you'd missed a thing, save a rumble or two.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer by William Arnold
In its best moments, resembles a bad high school production of "Grease," without benefit of song.