It is not deep, but it is fun to watch. It does have a bit more of an edge to it than other similar films.

There is definitely an excellent idea hidden in the background of the film. Unfortunately, it's difficult to find it.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

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.

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.