Here is a movie that was so pedestrian for 90% of it that it had no right to become so challenging and frustrating at the end. Did the director decide to become auteur suddenly, 80% through the making of this movie? Yeesh. SPOILER ALERT Thing start out typically enough for 50's youth-gone-wild; there are drifters, good girls, bad girls, gangs, the kindly old diner manager, and the town creep. Things follow the expected path until about 15 minutes before the end, when the only likable character is killed off and the anti-hero is blamed (this would not be so unexpected if this were the main plot of the movie... but all this stuff starts happening and unravelling during the final reel! Major curve ball). Then things get weird; the kindly old codger forms a mob and beats the hero to a bloody pulp. The mere presence of the hero's friend somehow drags a confession out of the real killer - the leering, creepy town nut (which in any real universe, he'd have been the prime suspect to begin with, even if the anti-hero was found with her body).<br /><br />We're left with a somewhat feeble "happy" ending, which is about as out of character with the rest of the movie as the events of the 10 minutes preceding it.<br /><br />Even more odd is this film's insistence on playing homosexual innuendo to the hilt, but constantly presenting the two male leads as straight. Maybe this was on purpose - perhaps Bix's resistance to settling down with the girl was more because of his sexuality (which in the 50s would have to be kept quite repressed, and thus not discussed or even admitted by him) than his need to be a "drifter". If the director's intent was to spin this as a sexual yarn - that the drifter drifts because he feels he's an outcast sexually; that his paternal regard towards Danny is not, in fact, paternal but spousal; that his inability to remain with Carrie is rooted in a sexual revulsion that even he does not quite understand - it could have been made more clear. Instead, we get this very bizarre alchemy of homoeroticism and behavior that is completely heterosexual.<br /><br />These young men sleep next to each other even when they can get some room to spread out. When Danny is propositioned (and once even in bed with a woman), Bix flips out and takes him away. Danny pays Bix's way (sure, there is another explanation for it, but it still strikes a chord every time you see Danny buy Bix's lunch). They end up living together at the end. Not since Hitchcock's "Rope" has homosexuality been so blatant but denied.<br /><br />MST3K did the right thing by taking this one on. Aside from Jack Elam, there is little to commend the film.