Puberty Blues (1981) on Netflix
Debbie Vickers and Sue Knight, teenagers in Sydney's Sutherland Shire, want a popular social standing. Over one summer they try to win over the Greenhill gang of surfers.
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- Netflix3.0/5
- IMDb5.9/101,833 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Trailer
Plot summary
Debbie Vickers and Sue Knight are teenagers in the middle-class Sutherland Shire in Sydney. Both want a popular standing among their peers, so they set about being accepted by the Greenhill gang, a set of surfers whose approach to casual sex, drugs and alcohol is careless. That effort runs across one Sydney summer. In the film the girls are sixteen, and Debbie carries stretches of the book in voice-over narration. It adapts a 1979 book of the same title, and it keeps the source's story line and character arc while adding a brawl on the beach between surfers and lifeguards.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Puberty Blues (1981)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Kathy Lette, who wrote the source novel with Gabrielle Carey, said the film sanitised the plot by dropping the book's references to miscarriage and abortion, and that it showed a culture in which gang rape was incidental and hard drug use fatal.
- The novel mentions the television series Number 96, but because that series had ended by the time of the 1981 film, the title spoken by the film's protagonist in voice-over was replaced with the generic term "television".
