For a movie that promises “The big jolt from Beatsville!” this movie really delivers a pretty standard crime movie, with the owner of a coffee shop (Edward Platt from Get Smart) hiring three of his beatnik customers to be part of a robbery.
Gene Fowler, Jr., who directed this, was mainly known as an editor. Probably his best known work in that endeavor would be It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. He also directed a few other movies, including I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Married a Monster from Outer Space. He was also an uncredited director on the 1978 film The Astral Factor.
I. Stanford Jolley, who was the voice of The Crimson Ghost in that famous movie serial, plays a beat poet named King Invader, which is a great name.
You can watch the Mystery Science Theater version of this movie on Tubi or download the original cut from the Internet Archive.
