Like Ecch, Man

The Bloody Brood (1959) is a Canadian beatsploitation flick starring an impossibly young Peter Falk as the slightly cross-eyed and all sinister Nico, a drug dealer who is also the leader of a group of beatniks.

They're having a party, dig? And the gang just witnessed the old newsie die of a heart attack at The Digs, dig?

So Nico and this other cat who dresses real square but is truly hip, you know, they decide that the real kick is to plan and carry out a murder.

(Okay, the attempt to write this in Beatnik ends now.)

So when this kid shows up with a telegram for the guy whose apartment they're trashing, and he's not there, and the kid sees a rather fleshy gal in tights doing one of those aimless dances you can still see at a Bob Weir/Phil Lesh show, well, it's all over, because these psychobeats feed the kid a hamburger with ground glass in it.

And the kid dies.

This infuriates his older brother, Cliff, who infiltrates The Digs (the bar where these dorks congregate) and eventually figures it out, in between getting beat up by Nico's underworld henchmen.

The big denouement is when Cliff bribes the house poet (the Gregory Corso of this group) with cash and booze to read a horrible poem that reveals the details of the murder.

This sounds like pure fermented curd, and in many ways this is a pretty crummy flick.

But the acting is pretty good. The direction is pretty good. And the music is pretty good.

The poetry, bongo playing, and bad dancing, however, are about as scaly as you'd expect.

So for a cheapo exploitation flick designed to take advantage of the notoriety of the Beats, it's not half bad.

I give this one an honest three coils.