Wild Youth (1961)

NAKED YOUTH is an odd film--one that appears at first to be a stupid exploitation film and nothing more. However, despite the word 'naked' in the title, there is nothing naked at all in the film and it's just a low-budget thriller--one that is very good considering the amount of money they had to spend on the production. While it won't be mistaken for the work of Truffaut or Hitchcock, this cheapie picture isn't bad at all.The film begins in Mexico. A vicious killer stabs a man who is carrying a package filled with heroin. The killer and his drug-addicted girlfriend plan on smuggling this into the States and making a fortune. However, in an odd (and very contrived twist), these two pick up three wild young people--two of which just escaped from prison. Now the idea of the killer stopping to pick up hitchhikers when they've got a package filled with drugs is dumb--a huge plot problem. However, when the three youths get into a fight with the crazed killer, the film heats up and becomes tense and exciting. You'd think the three young punks would be at a distinct advantage, but this crazy killer is more than a match for them!! Add to this tension involving the worst of the three trying to repeatedly rape the young lady and you've got quite a tense film.Overall, despite low production values and a very poor DVD print, this film is well written (generally), very well directed and some of the acting is actually good. While it's far from a must-see film, it's a great example of a movie with limited means that manages to be entertaining and rise above the usual low-budget dreck.

The film could have been so much better than it ultimately turned out to be, and I blame the director for that. He had some fairly good actors to work with, he just didn't know what to do with them.For instance, Steve Rowland did much better acting in his other film roles, yet he's wooden throughout most of this one. I would have had him act much more sinister, instead of performing the pretty-boy, James Dean type role. He should have come across as a worthless scumbag kid, yet he doesn't even appear to be a smoker, a doper, or a drinker. In this movie he's simply a poster boy, complete with the tight t-shirt and windbreaker, open to his navel.Spoilers ahead....Our gangster character fares much better in his role. You believe he's self-centered and sadistic. His moll gives a good performance, though having her kill her lover seemed out-of-character, and what made him think he could take out the armed cop with a thrown knife??? I would have had the kid and the gangster kill one another in the end, but then I wasn't the director.You gotta love the homo-erotic final scene as the camera slowly pans over the body of the gut-stabbed, late-twenties teenager (Rowland)! What a classic! If you don't expect too much from this film you might like it. I liked it, despite it's flaws. It's a hoot!

2 guys in Mexican juvie run away with help of a very fickle girl. While at the same time some guy buy's heroin at a bull fighting stadium somewhere in Mexico. After safely crossing the border back to the U.S. the guy with the heroin and his girl (a heroin addict) pass some hitch-hikers. They give them a lift, these hitch-hikers happen to be the 2 guys that ran away from juvie and the fickle girl. Now when you put juvenile delinquents, drugs, and a fiending addict in a car what do you get? You'll have to find out what happens from there. It's an OK movie, nothing great. It was pretty raunchy for it's time, but that's not saying much for today. No blood, no realistic deaths, no showing of actual drug use, no nudity, no sexual anything but the fickle girl kissing everyone. The only person in the movie I recognized was Carol Ohmart, from House on Haunted Hill and Spider Baby. She plays a somewhat believable heroin addict. It was an all right movie and completely worth the 2 bucks my boyfriend paid for it.

The most startling thing about Schreyer's drugs-on-the-run piece is the brazen 'lifting' of Elmer Bernstein's striking Frankie Machine title music, almost unchanged from 'The Man With The Golden Arm', as well as a recognisable chunk of Herrman's 'Vertigo' music .. such borrowings give this film a suggestion of artistry which it completely fails to justify.In fact it is all very humdrum stuff, neither too wild or much naked either, come to that (and the 'youths' are getting on a bit as well). The most recognisable face in this rather tedious piece is Robert Hutton, who plays the unperturbable and cop. Of course it is he who buys the Mexican dolls into which the heroin is secreted, and then transported across the border, so poetic justice demands that it is he who has to find it again. Hutton was better used in such cult films as 'The Slime People' (1962), 'Colossus of New York' (1958) and a handful of others. Here he just looks vaguely engaged.As Switch the knife happy thug on the run from the Honor Farm,(in a film in which, oddly, knives are the weapon of choice - even when a gun is around) Rowland is serviceable enough, although he could have made his performance more menacing. As it is, Switch veers uncertainly between aggression, indecisiveness and whining.The best scene? Madge's swaying vision as her withdrawl sets in, done to Herrmann-'inspired' music. But even she's seen better days in William Castle's great 'House on Haunted Hill' (1958) or Hill's crazy 'Spider Baby' (1964).A film mostly of interest for completists or those fanatical about this part of exploitation history.