Diagonaldi Very well executed

2hotFeature one of my absolute favorites!

Asad Almond A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

Jerrie It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

bkoganbing I'm sure any number of prurient drive-in viewers had their appetites whetted by the title of Naked Youth, probably renamed such so a few more cars would get into the parking spaces. A little stimulus before getting down to business in the back seat. If that was the case they were disappointed because Wild Youth or Naked Youth hasn't even a hint of nudity. What this film is about is a trio youths Robert Arthur and Steve Rowland who busted out of an honor farm and Jan Brooks the girl who helped them running into a hardened killer and dope peddler Robert Hutton and his strung out girlfriend Carol Ohmart. Hutton robbed and killed a drug mule in Mexico took his supply of heroin and smuggled it back across the border before the cops on both sides caught on.Arthur and Brooks are basically decent kids, but Rowland is a punk and learns too late he's playing way out of his league.Wild/Naked Youth was shot on a chump change budget in the Southwest and no one covered themselves in any glory here.

Johnboy1221 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!

zardoz-13 "Naked Youth" generates a modicum of suspense as it intertwines two stories about criminals on the lam in the dusty southwestern United States. First, a couple of youths at a State Honor Farm--Switch (Steve Rowland)and Frankie (Robert Arthur)decide to escape and rendezvous with Frankie's cute girlfriend who has a car waiting for them nearby under a bridge to make their getaway. Second, Rivas (John Goddard) is a drug smuggler in suit and tie who kills a Mexican dope buyer with a knife at a deserted bullfighting arena and then flees Mexico with his own girlfriend Madge (Carol Ohmart)carrying a doll packed with smack in the nick of time before the authorities lock down the border. Meanwhile, tension between Switch--he wields a switchblade but appears to be all gab and no guts--and Frankie develop over his girlfriend. This tension grows after their getaway car overheats and forces them to walk the rest of the way on foot in the hot, arid desert. Goddard and his girlfriend pick them up in their station wagon so that they will look like one big happy family and fool the cops. Goddard spots a roadblock, loses his nerve, and swerves off onto a back road. Eventually, the kids and he tangle. Frankie slugs him from behind, and they rip out the distributor cap from their car and force the adults afoot, too. It seems that Switch--nicknamed for his reliance on an illegal switchblade knife--and Rivas are both edgy about blade fanatics. The chief difference is that Rivas is ready, willing, and able to stab at the least provocation. Robert Hutton, once a popular character actor in Warner Brothers' World War II movies such as "Destination Tokyo" and "Hollywood Canteen," plays a Federal agent named Maddo who tails these reprobates. This low budget juvenile delinquent/narcotics exploitation drive-in feature maintains a fast enough with okay performances and authentic on-the-road realism. Nothing in the way of memorable lines of dialogue make up for their predictable shennagians, but none of it is idiotic either. In fact, "Naked Youth" doesn't qualify as one of those "so bad it's good" thrillers with hundreds of gaffes. This represented director John F. Schreyer's only directorial outing; he was better known for editing westerns and war movies, such as "Hostile Guns," "More Dead Than Alive," and "Ambush Bay." Nevertheless, he knows when to cut back and forth between the pursued and the pursuers. You can tell that the Production Code Administration was still enforcing some of its self-censorship rules because when Carol Ohmart injects herself with heroin in the forearm, we get to see the reaction shots of those watching her shoot up. Ironically, Ohmart's character is the most sympathetic of the bunch. She guns down her dastardly boyfriend rather than see him murder a Maddo. The worst thing about this exploitation meller is that the music is a blatant rip-off of Elmer Bernstein's "The Man With The Golden Arm" and Bernard Herrman's "Vertigo." Otherwise, "Naked Youth," which boasts neither nude scenes nor sex scenes to speak of and refrains from preaching its crime does not pay message, is passable.

insanecrzygrlie 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.