Watch The Beatniks For Free

That was an excellent one.

Just perfect...

There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

After knocking over a market, Eddy Crane (Tony Travis) and the rest of his gang stop at a diner for a bite to eat. Quite unexpectedly (at least I didn't see it coming), Eddy begins singing to a little jazzy number playing on the jukebox. He's overheard by a talent agent who thinks he can make Eddy a star. Before you can say "Daddy-O", Eddy's on TV and has a recording contract lined up. But Eddy can't escape his past. While celebrating his good fortune, one of his friends, Mooney (Peter Breck), kills a bartender. Eddy's agent asks the gang to leave Eddy alone and gets stabbed for his efforts. The gang drags Eddy back down at every opportunity. Eddy's must ultimately fight for his freedom.I wonder if Paul Frees and the rest of those behind this bad idea of a movie had any concept of just what a "beatnik" was. It doesn't appear so. Calling this gang of self-centered, unintelligent, small-time hoods with a Pat Boone style crooner as its leader "beatniks" would have Maynard G. Krebs spinning in his grave. These aren't "beatniks" in the traditional sense of the word. These are not the philosophical counter-cultural bongo beaters Kerouac wrote about. If everyone involved wasn't in their 30s, I'd call them juvenile delinquents. Beatniks? I don't think so.But beyond the misuse of "beatniks", the movie has very little to offer. Some moments in The Beatniks might be appealing in that bizarrely entertaining sort of way, but not in any traditional sense. The plot it bad, the acting is horrible, and the cinematography is as lazy as I've seen recently. In short, The Beatniks isn't a very good movie.

Filmed for $2.67, this routine, rather predictable film is only good for a few unintentional laughs. Among the least of its many problems is that nothing whatsoever having to do with beatniks ever appears in the movie! The story concerns a group of troublemakers who don masks and rob the same store over and over in order to gain spending money. They then head to the coffee shop run by one of their girlfriend's mother and dance to the tunes on the juke box. One day, Travis is singing along with an instrumental number and is discovered by record producer Delaney who is trapped at the coffee shop with car trouble and is hanging on the pay phone, waiting for help. Instantaneously, Travis zips to the big city where he appears on a TV show, then, after making a huge splash, is set up the next evening to record his first album! Unfortunately, he's dragged along his entourage of Breck, Edwards, Wells and Kadler who proceed to trash his hotel room, coerce him into staying out late and generally wreck his chances at success. More drama unfolds as Travis attempts to rectify his and his gang's wrongdoings and make a go of his potential new life as a singing star. Travis is an attractive young man and ought to have had a slightly better career than he wound up with. His lip-synching to the songs is abominable, though. He obviously has no idea what he's doing. (The vocals he's singing to, though, are surprisingly good!) Kadler plays his girlfriend and is a dead-ringer for Ava Gardner, though lacking Gardner's charisma and talent as a performer. Edwards (who was in his mid-forties at the time of filming!) and Wells don't have a lot to do, but do try to come up with ways to pass the time (check out Wells attempting to recreate, in the mirror, a hairstyle on a magazine cover he's holding!) Delaney is all right at times, but doesn't appear to be well and, in fact, died before the film's release! Playing his secretary and the woman who steals Travis' heart is Terry. She gives a reasonable performance, but has distracting blew eyes. That is to say that one blew one way and one blew another! Careening though the film in a reprehensibly bad performance of hellacious ham is Breck. It's amazing that he ever worked again after this unbelievably rotten piece of indulgent, unappealing "acting". (Amazingly, he went on to craft the highly likable character of Nick on "The Big Valley" a few years after this.) One major supporting role (unbilled) is the boom mike, which looms into view with regularity. It's shabbily directed by voice-over artist Frees and he cast the film with virtually all fellow voice-over performers. It's clear why most of them stayed off-camera through the bulk of their careers! The camera-work is often pitiful with uncomfortable framing and close-ups which almost get the actors' entire faces in the frame. It's got a stale story, a bad script, mediocre acting and uncreative direction. The only thing it's really good for is as a curio to poke fun at, which the MST3K guys did gleefully. Viewers may be quite surprised to find out that Edwards supplied the voice of Thumper in Walt Disney's "Bambi" (not to mention that Wentworth, playing Kadler's mom, was Madam Mim in "The Sword in the Stone".)

This movie has one tiny little problem with it: THERE ARE NO REAL BEATNIKS IN IT!! No goatees, no jazz, no berets, and only one of them wears black. What it does have is a cheap Pat Boone clone that can't sing, but does anyway. He sings his way to the top, and the gang he hung out with tries to keep him down. After hearing him sing, I was like Simon Cowell on the American Idol promo poster.Rightfully skewered on MST3K, this should be avoided unless you're watching that version.

Maybe for the time is might have been, especially with a tag-line like that. This pretty obscure film is about Bad singers, Sleazy Talent scouts, teen gangs, robbery and general pandemonium. No Beatniks here, really. Ginsberg and Kerouac probably couldn't believe what they had wrought-this certainly was not it.If you want to see a better example of one of the so called "beatnik" films that were created around 1959 to 1961, (where Exploitation Producers latched onto popular media phrases like "Beatnik"), check out The Beat Generation starring Mamie Van Doren, or Beat Girl starring a then unknown Oliver Reed. Although these were not about 'niks they had a somewhat inkling to what a "beatnik" was.As with all exploitation films very few of the catch phrases and trends used in marketing the films were used very accurately, nevertheless the films did make obscene amounts of money because they were presented to the public within a few months of a trend that was in high gear.