What’s a beatnik, you ask? Some say it’s any of the band of existential artists and seekers who drifted through the world of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs; others will tell you they were the original hipsters, shallow trend-surfers whose way of being radical was to dress like it - the original counter-culture.

Whatever a beatnik is, you can be absolutely sure that there is NOT A SINGLE BEATNIK IN THE MOVIE The Beatniks. Not a one. Oh there’s a hack singer, Eddy, who wants to be a pop star, his clingy girlfriend Iris, but Eddy throws her to the side for fame, fortune and a plastic-faced bug lady. And there’s his psychopathic pal Mooney, who kills a fat barkeep and threatens to “moon” people, although I don’t think he means it in the way we all commonly understand. None of them do what you expect beatniks would do, or act like you would expect beatniks to act, unless you count singing like Perry Como as “beat.” But one thing you can be completely sure of, and which you’ll be minded of countless times, is that Mooney killed that fat barkeep.

Enjoy a catchy song about sideburns!

Also enjoy a very early episode of “General Hospital,” a thing so gray it makes the color gray look pinkish.