SUMMER OF BLOOD: NEW HOLLYWOOD HORROR - LORD HELP THE MISTER

One of the main unifying traits that connects nearly all the filmmakers who were part of the New Hollywood Cinema period (not every last one, of course) was their knowledge of cinema. For most of them, this was the result of having gone through film school rather than come up as an apprentice, the way most film artists prior to the early 1970s had done; they were the first generation trained in cinema history and to have absorbed the theories of the French critics in the '50s and '60s as an academic truth. They were, in short, the first American filmmaking generation as to be on the whole cinephiles, in the sense that we now use that word.

This meant different things in different individual cases, but I bring it up now because we're about to set our sights on Brian De Palma, who presents one of the clearest examples of "film buff as film director" in the history of the medium. I suspect that the one thing people know about De Palma if they've heard of him at all, is that he's the director who made all of the Hitchcock pastiches. This is unfairly reductive - you can count on one hand the number of De Palma films that are primarily Hitchcockian - but the lines of influence are clear and unmistakable.

So with that, let us turn to 1973's Sisters, De Palma's seventh feature in five years, and also one of those primarily Hitchcockian films. In fact, so consciously was the director looking towards the great Hitch for his cues that he used an assortment cuts from Bernard Herrmann's scores for Hitchcock movies as his temp track, before talking the actual Herrmann out of retirement to write the "original" score. And those scare quotes aren't optional - there are moments, right from the very beginning, where the music isn't riffing on Psycho and Vertigo, so much as directly lifting from Psycho and Vertigo with a couple of notes switched here or there to make it at least slightly unclear what's up (sometimes, it dives into electronic music that sounds nothing remotely like any of Herrmann's work with Hitchcock) But it works in its new context, and really that's the only thing we need to be particularly worried about.

As for De Palma's story, which he turned into a screenplay with Louisa Rose, it's superficially quite a blast of Hitchcock in its own right: the first act plays the same "false protagonist who suddenly dies" card as Psycho, and the second act steals "sometimes apartment dwellers can see terrible crimes being committed across the way" straight from Rear Window. That film also supplies a number of individual story beats, and many of the individual shots and story ingredients crib from some Hitchcock film or another, right up until a final scene that works as both homage to and parody of the final shot of Psycho, the one with the car housing a corpse being dredged up from the swamp.

The important thing to note in all of this is that Sisters isn't simply an exercise in remixing classic thrillers for the sake of showing off De Palma's knowledge of film history. Which I confess had been my impression for many years, and was the major reason I've put off watching till now. It's craftier than that; it starts at Hitchcock and then pushes forward, making a fantasia on Hitchcockian themes with the angry energy of the new. For all its nods towards classicism, Sisters is a vigorously '70s movie, in its psychosexual raggedness (long before "psychosexual" had become the most clichéd way of describing any kind of thriller), and the ugly frankness with which it depicts the streets and buildings of New York. And its primary mode of tension and horror is forward-looking as much as it's conservative - there are moments whose staging and conception anticipate David Cronenberg more than the look backwards to Hitchcock or anyone else.

And all of that misses a pervasive truth of Sisters that I expected not at all, and was delighted to find: it's a funny movie. Perversely, darkly funny, sure - the opening credits are photographs of human fetuses, delicately positioned to stare at the camera with dark scowls of murderous rage, and it's as discomfiting as it is hilarious. But there's also room for the grand absurdity of the fake game show where we enter the story, Peeping Toms, something like a sexualised Candid Camera, in which hidden camera capture victims in awkward situations, with a panel of players asked to guess how they reacted to their situation. Our particular game concerns Phillip (Lisle Wilson), who's stunned to see a gorgeous blind woman, Danielle (Margot Kidder, who dances nimbly at the edge of comedy with a big ol' Québécoise accent) wander into the men's locker room and start changing. He has the good grace to leave quietly without watching or humiliating the woman - who is, of course, an actress, and can see just fine - and so wins two dinners at a fancy restaurant. After the show she suggests that he takes her out on a date with his prize, during which meal they're interrupted by her intense and frightening ex-husband, Emil Breton (William Finley). It's not enough to dissuade her from inviting Phillip back to her place on Staten Island, where they have sex after tricking Emil into thinking they were parting for the night.

The next morning, Phillip overhears an argument between Danielle and her identical twin sister, Dominique - by this point, we've already seen the enormous scar on Danielle's right hip, as accompanied by an electronic sting on the musical score that is much too freaked out the scar and much too anxious to make sure we absolutely pay all of our attention to it, so we've got quite a head start on figuring out exactly what kind of twins they are - after which Danielle emerges and asks if he'd be so kind as to pick up her pills, while also idly mentioning that it's her and her sister's birthday. On the way home from the pharmacy, he decides to use this information to play a nice surprise, buying the twins a cake, and this proves decisive; the delay in taking her medication sends Danielle into a writhing fit on the floor. By the time Phillip gets back, Danielle is nowhere to be seen, and Dominique is asleep on the bed; when Phillip rouses her, she grabs the knife he brought to cut the cake, cutting him in each of his femoral arteries (or, cutting him twice in the same femoral artery; there's bad continuity racing throughout the film, and some of it is clearly intentional, but this is one of the places where I think it probably isn't), letting him bleed out.

This is witnessed from across the alley by Grace Collier (Jennifer Salt), a columnist with a local paper who has managed to get herself in trouble with the local police thanks to an article titled "Why We Call Them Pigs", among other attempts to rouse the populace in radical anger, from her tiny little soapbox. "Yes, the Grace Collier, I wrote that story" she sighs on the phone with the cops, in a beautifully petulant comic line delivery that I wish I could bottle and listen to every time my spirits were low. She eventually convinces them to come over to check things out, at which point things start to get interesting as all hell: to sell her story, she starts piling on details that we know to be true, because we were in the room when Phillip died. But Grace wasn't, and she could only see a fraction of the killing from her apartment - this we know because we see the image as she sees it, and it's even put into a zoom backwards to make sure we notice just how circumscribed the angle she has into the room is.

The police find nothing, so Grace persuades her paper to let her do some investigative reporting, which they'll only do after assigning her a private detective, Larch (Charles Durning), to help. What they find is at times not remotely surprising (Danielle and Dominque were conjoined twins, a fact the movie tries so little to hide that it shows up in the ad campaign), and is some places enormously surprising, and at some places is surprising primarily because the movie made one twist that doesn't happen seem incredibly obvious, so we were looking the other direction while a different twist altogether sneaks up on us. It would be shabby to give away more - this isn't a Psycho, where it has become such a carved-in-granite classic that everybody knows how it ends. Let us leave it with: the things you expect to be revealed are all cleared off the deck early enough that the film has enough time left over to go into places that I did not see coming at all, tranforming flawlessly from a horror-tinged mystery about shady Québécois doctors going to extraordinary lengths to hide their professional and personal sins from the world, into a surrealist nightmare about having one's identity pulled out from below, and one that revises the question of who these people are so definitively that the ellipses and confusing loose ends the film was teasing us with earlier turn out to be nothing but its most dramatic sleight-of-hand.

It's an extremely unsatisfying conclusion, but it's hard to imagine one that would fit better; even the fact that it's unsatisfying plays off the film's depiction of the limits of what we perceive and how we interpret it; sometimes you just don't fucking know what's going on, and Sisters is, among other things, a big tease in stretching out our pleasant misery at not being able to solve all of its mysteries. Really, it's mostly a game in perceptual exercises overall, from its deliberate employment of continuity errors to its fun use of split-screens: at one point the film shows Danielle and Emil's desperate attempt to clean-up after Dominique (another Psycho nod) in one half while Grace's frustrated attempt to get the cops to god-damn go upstairs already plays in the other, a nifty way of building tension through style that mere cross-cutting wouldn't be able to achieve, while also making demands of our attention that we're of course not quite able to meet, and so the film once again points out that stuff is going to happen and we can't figure it all out.

There's an attempt at social commentary here: the brutishness of cops towards women and minorities is an obvious point the movie wants to touch on, though it does so only glancingly. It's more sustained in looking with horror at the abuses of power by authoritative men, with its final twenty minutes a sustained flurry of sucker punches that manage to show how such abuses can continue on in the world even after the abuser is dead. But the things that are most lingering about Sisters are generally stylistic: it's the flair with which De Palma stages his imagery that lingers more than what those images denote. A bright red spot on a sofa there, shallow focus to make it all the clearer how much the film is preventing us from seeing there, and plenty of skillful lifts from Hitchcock. It's a bit more surface level than it entirely wants to be, and the wackiness in the performances from Kidder (inadvertent) and Salt (deliberate, or at least successful) don't serve to give it any more depth, though they do make it quite a bit more fun. And when that fun suddenly flashes to sharply-honed cruelty, the film packs a hell of a lot of punch for something that's basically an insubstantial genre exercise. It's a terrifically smart piece of craftsmanship that keeps slithering out of your grasp; maybe not a great cinema by the usual standards, but I found it a compulsively addictive viewing experience.

Body Count: 2, and its surprisingly unambiguous about that number, considering how much else it's ambiguous about.

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1966: In which we briefly turn our gaze to the Los Angeles-based independent scene, and their ability to adjust far faster than the studio system ever could

My first thought is not a very professional one: holy shit, Diane Ladd used to look exactly like her daughter. Now that I've got that out of my system, I can turn to the matter at hand.

And the matter at hand is The Wild Angels, a film without which the subsequent history of cinema would look wildly different. This was the movie that really kicked off the biker film fad of the middle and late 1960s, not because it was first (biker pictures had been around for over a decade, though their popularity, and the popularity of the juvenile delinquent film more generally, began waning towards the end f the '50s; nor was it the first biker movie of the mid-'60s), but because it was by far the most popular, coming out at the exact moment when the rising notoriety of the Hell's Angels brought the subculture back into the limelight and made the time perfect for a savvy producer to exploit that culture for all it was worth (not incidentally, Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels came out around the same time as the film). And oh, how The Wild Angels had a savvy producer, the savviest of them all: Roger Corman, who also directed, making the film under the aegis of American International Pictures, the most savvy of all bloodlessly mercenary independent film companies.

Anyway, that's not the reason the film had such massive influence, though it's a little bit interesting. The really important thing is that Corman had the good sense to cast in the film's lead role Peter Fonda, an unusually prominent figure in the burgeoning counterculture, owing to his rock-solid establishment bona fides (being the son of Henry Fonda would do that), mixed with his rather showy rejection of that establishment and his retrenchment within the West Coast hippie scene. This gave The Wild Angels an immediate shot of verisimilitude, and even more importantly, it got Fonda to thinking about deeper themes that could be explored using the mechanism of a biker film, and after a couple of years, that development of his onscreen persona and his offscreen philosophy, as initiated by this film, resulted in Easy Rider. And that film's seismic place in the development of American film is both well-known and undeniable.

The Wild Angels has to settle for being a pretty satisfying bit of grimy exploitation, not a cultural flashpoint and medium-altering achievement. And I suppose that's just the way Corman would have wanted it, him being one of cinema's all-time great pragmatists: I do not suppose that anyone would genuinely accuse him of having one-of-a-kind skills with the camera or actors, nor did he ever make a film that fundamentally challenged the way that stories could be communicated visually. But at his height, he was a genius anyway: rare indeed was the filmmaker who could so accurately predict what the audience would want, and when they'd want it, and then make a movie to fulfill that want for a budget that's closer to the cost of a new car than a "real" film production.

Clearly, The Wild Angels scratched some itch for watching the exotic, brutal adventures of barely-disguised Hell's Angels analogues (indeed "barely disguised" is giving the film the benefit of the doubt: the motorcycle club is named specifically in dialogue, and while we never see the Angels' famous death's head logo, the jackets the bikers wear are otherwise dead ringers for the famous, infamous Angel colors). Movies don't create genres without tapping into some deep-seated cultural current. And yet, the most conspicuous reality of The Wild Angels is that it was plainly made by old men who had no real idea about the subculture they were depicting. Corman himself was the very model of a square, far more concerned with how to squeeze every penny out of his projects, and when sociological messages crept into the films he wrote and produced, it seems to be mostly because he didn't see any profit in preventing his screenwriters from squirreling some themes away into the subtext. And he commissioned the script for the film from his good lackey Charles B. Griffith, who was, confessedly, one of the people who threaded some interesting subtexts into his scripts, but certainly couldn't count himself part of the counterculture. Much of the screenplay was rewritten by Peter Bogdanovich, who at least comes closer; but he was more of a film nerd than just about anyone else in a generation of film nerds. And from the onscreen evidence, in which authentic-sounding biker slang is wielded in the most stiff, inorganic way possible, we can go on and assume that nobody involved in putting that screenplay together was practicing anything like embedded journalism in making it happen.

The result - this is the key part - is that The Wild Angels falls into a foggy place where it at once wants to serve as a niche-targeting movie for all the young people beginning to voice the same sentiments about freedom and a lack of responsibility that we hear spoken by the characters onscreen, while pathologising that attitude as proof of the essential hedonist immorality of the characters espousing it. Basically, it's a piece of bikesploitation that deeply fears the dangerous potential of bikers and biker culture, but carries itself like a rabble-rousing cry of passion, in total sympathy with its characters, getting just at outraged at the injustices carried out against them as they are. It's a fucking weird mix of form and message, and I suspect that in the cold light of day, it means that The Wild Angels is an incoherent piece of nonsense; but since I am a Corman booster in good standing, I choose instead to take it as proof of his canny ability to make everyone happy at once. And since the film ended up a hit among the proverbial Kids These Days, he must have done a good job of it.

The Wild Angels is an early example of the "slice of life" picture, telling very little in the way of plot; it has an incident that shapes and guides the entirety of its hour and a half, but there's not nearly enough of that to make for a proper drama, and mostly what we see are people existing, responding to that incident but not with a great deal or urgency or, apparently, sense of things being terribly unique. And this too is part of the Corman school of stretching a buck: show as much talking as possible, at the expense of action, and if the talk is colorful and descriptive enough, nobody is going to very much care. The deal, basically, is that club leader Heavenly Blues (Fonda) has picked up some news that the missing bike belonging to his follower, the Loser (Bruce Dern) has been spotted in Mecca, Mexico. So the Angels say goodbye to their old ladies - Blues with his girlfriend Mike (Nancy Sinatra), Loser to his wife Gaysh (Ladd) - and discover that the bike has been stripped in a chop shop. In the ensuing brawl, the Loser snags a police bike, and a chase follows, leaving him shot, while the rest of the Angels escape. Sensing a trap, Blues nevertheless okays a mission to steal Loser from the hospital, and while they are successful, a nurse that some of the Angels tried to rape - Blues stopping them - identifies them. While the Angels head into Northern California to stage a funeral for their fallen comrade, the police begin to plot their capture of the notorious bikers.

Put it like that, and it sounds action-packed, but in the laconic, character-driven way it unfolds, it barely registers that there's any continuity between scenes at all. It's very existential in its feeling, in fact, certainly pushed in that direction by Fonda's restrained, uninflected performance. By the time the last scene rolls around, with Blues rather despondently giving up all hope - a precursor to the "We blew it" moment from Easy Rider, though played with more dramatic nihilism here than there - the film has been so fully saturated with an elegaic tone thanks to Fonda's work that even when it's at its most alarmed (such as in the borderline campy funeral scene with the Angels profane a church), the film feels more tender and sad than outrageous and exploitative.

But exploitative it is, and alarmist: from the opening credits, in which the "W" in "Wild" is cross-bred with a swastika, the film's insistent comparison of the Angels with brutality, anti-social behavior, and Nazi imagery is pervasive, and at weird odds to its emotional investment in their attempt to find peace, however they define it. I really can't explain it other than to assume that Corman and AIP were openly anxious to get both the bikers and the moralists on their side; that, or they only cared about being salacious and edgy, without reference to anything deeper than "what sells?" At any rate, I have no idea if the film's depiction biker culture is remotely accurate, either in its attempts at realism or its attempts at scare mongering; I just know that it's a weirdly moody, frequently dysfunctional drama whose completely casual depiction of the California underclasses has a raw, realistic tang that studio pictures had an immensely hard time matching, slow as they were to respond to the shifts in culture. And it is never less than fascinating, even when it's clearly not working on any level.

Also, it has a scene where Fonda, disgusted with himself, his lifestyle, the society that wants to tame him and his people, the planet that bore them all, stands alone outside at night, while yowling cats have been foleyed onto the soundtrack so loudly and aggressively - and a whole bunch of different cats, too - that the movie suddenly feels like it's drifted into some kind of avant-garde Catwoman riff. I have no idea how it fits into the rest of the film on any level, but I adore it: it never hurts to forget that, for all their fascinations, the films of Corman and AIP, together and apart, are still basically terrible, and moments like that are glorious reminders of how goofy low-budget B-movies could be.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1966
-The short Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree is the final animated film released by Disney before its namesake's death in December
-John Ford, a man's man of a director, ends his career with the decidedly uncharacteristic 7 Women
-Avant-garde artist and self-aware brand name Andy Warhol makes his mainstream breakthrough with Chelsea Girls

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1966
-Sembène Ousmane's Black Girl, a Senegalese-French co-production, brings sub-Saharan African cinema to international attention
-Italian master Michelangelo Antonioni makes the anti-thriller Blowup in England, documenting and autopsying the newly-forming counterculture
-The criminally under-appreciated and horrifyingly short-lived Soviet filmmaker Larisa Shepitko makes Wings, her first feature after graduating from film school

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SNOW-COVERED BEACH PARTIES: EVEN THE BEGINNERS WILL BE HAVING FUN

In the waning days of the mid-'60s surf fad, and the short-lived but intense burst of beach party movies that tagged eagerly along, the brains at American International Pictures came up with many new ways to prolong the life of that cash cow which they had largely invented, each more weird and strange than the last: beach movies plus sci-fi, plus Bondian spy thrillers, plus ghost stories, plus racing thrillers. Not the first, not the last, and not the weirdest - though by Christ, it is very weird indeed - was the beach movie plus winter, introduced in the functionally-named Ski Party. Which, in a fit of puckishness, was released in June of 1965.

This was AIP's sole experiment in this direction, though it was apparently some kind of hit, because a couple of knock-off beach/ski hybrids were made by AIP's competitors. I will confess that this turn of events surprises me somewhat, because Ski Party is sort of bad. The entire genre of beach movies was sort of bad, of course, but the best ones compensated for it with a bouncy energy and who-the-fuck-cares creativity that made them imaginative pop culture curios anyway. Ski Party bounces about as well as a lead tennis ball, and instead of who-the-fuck-cares, the overriding tone is closer to we-don't-fucking-care. It's a flat-footed farce whose gestures in the direction of imaginative absurdity are too bland and mean-spirited to land as comedy. The best example is the film's routine habit of breaking the third wall, with co-leads Frankie Avalon and Dwayne Hickman frequently addressing the camera to acknowledge that they understand the conventions of the genre as much as the audience does. Instead of being bracing and punchy, the feeling is more of exasperation - a sort of "God almighty, can you believe how relentlessly shitty the things we're saying and doing are? Really, can you? Do you know how many of these damned things we've made in the last two years?" Particularly with Hickman giving such a uniformly sour, petulant performance at every turn.

It's tempting to blame the creative team: the best AIP beach movies were all directed and mostly co-written by William Asher, typically with Leo Townsend sharing script duties, and AIP honchos Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson on-hand as producers. Ski Party keeps Arkoff and Nicholson removed to executive producer status, replaced in their immediate duties by Gene Corman, Roger's less interesting and successful younger brother. Directing was handed off to Alan Rafkin, a sitcom director making the first of a small number of features (he was still active on TV until shortly before his death, into his 70s), and the screenplay was by Robert Kaufman, also a sitcom veteran making his first movie, though he'd stick around the movies quite a bit more successfully. The point being though, is that there was a smallness to the creative background of these men, and Ski Party does not find them pushing very hard to broaden their aesthetic. The outline of their creative poverty is hinted at if we observe that Ski Party is in large part a shticky retread of the then 6-year-old Some Like It Hot, but the true scope of their hackery is only revealed by learning that they have the clanging balls to reference Some Like It Hot by name in their dialogue.

The scenario is straightforward and reductive as all hell, and even by the standards of a subgenre whose whole entire purpose was to put girls in bikinis and guys in board shorts, its gender politics are stuffy and ancient. Todd Armstrong (Avalon) and Craig Gamble (Hickman) are best buddies at a Southern California college, and they are utterly baffled by women. Their latest attempted conquests, Linda (Deborah Whalley) and Barbara (Yvonne Craig) have only pity and certainly no romantic ardor for them, and they can't understand how preening blond alpha-male Freddie (Aron Kincaid) can possibly score with so many women, so they study him. And in studying him, they decide that the key is more co-ed sports (?), which is why they crash a ski trip during break. Their inability to ski helps them out not at all, but the only ski instruction available is for women. I pray you can see where this is going.

Todd, as "Jane", gets plenty of cues from the girls on how to attract American boys (their disguises are meant to be British exchange students, though neither Avalon nor Hickman attempts even the slightest accent behind their screechy falsettos), while Craig's "Nora" immediately attracts Freddie, who feels for "her" an intensity of passion he's never felt for anyone. Perhaps to compensate for this dimly interesting hint of homoeroticism, Ski Party retrenches into what might be the earliest overt gay panic humor I've ever witnessed. Which still isn't half as galling as the nonstop repetition of "Women! Like some kind of crazy-ass space aliens, am I right?" jokes that make up the middle third of the movie, reminding one with a dismal pang of how much better these movies are when Annette Funicello is around to provide some sardonic wit and wisdom as the romantic leading lady (she pops up in a cameo as a professor, right at the start, in a rare acknowledgement by AIP that their stable of teen idols were quite long in the tooth).

Rafkin's direction effectively smothers whatever comedy survives Avalon and Hickman's surprisingly crummy baner, and all that's left is the most left-field absurdity to give the movie any punch, like a yodeling polar bear that wanders through from time to time, or a literal ex-Nazi ski instructor recalling the Battle of Stalingrad. The film is hastily and sloppily assembled: scenes jam into each other like bumper cars, and the two big celebrity musical cameos - Lesley Gore singing the two-year-old "Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows", and James Brown with the much newer "I Got You (I Feel Good)" - are plagued by awful sound mixing and terrible lip-synching. There is a certain joyless expediency to virtually everything onscreen save for Bobbi Shaw's dippy Swedish sexpot ski instructor; a stock cartoon character to be sure, but Shaw was good at it, and it's the only self-assured performance in the film. Which speaks volumes about where the film's energy level is set. It's by no means as dreadfully awful as something like the perfunctory How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, but it's just no damned fun, and with this much smutty, manic content executed in a way that strips it of its fun, the film ends up a shrill slog.

Reviews in this series
Beach Party (Asher, 1963)
Muscle Beach Party (Asher, 1964)
Bikini Beach (Asher, 1964)
Pajama Party (Weis, 1964)
Beach Blanket Bingo (Asher, 1965)
Ski Party (Rafkin, 1965)
How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (Asher, 1965)
The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (Weis, 1966)

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BEACH PARTIES: BIKINI PARTY IN A HAUNTED HOUSE

Frankie Avalon wanted to play roles that befitted a man in his mid-to-late 20s, and new mom Annette Funicello wanted to spend time with her family, but by God, American International Pictures was American International Pictures, and they were going to make another beach party movie before all was said and done. That movie was The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini, first announced (in the end credits of Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine) as The Ghost in the Glass Bikini, and first put into production as a film that had, in fact, no ghost, and no invisible bikini for her to wear. It was only after AIP honchos James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff found the first cut of the movie to be ridiculous and stupid nonsense even according to the generous grading curve afforded to the beach movies, that they demanded a new subplot and frame story be introduced, in which carnival magnate Hiram Stokely (Boris Karloff) wakes up to find himself dead this past week, with the voluptuous ghost of his 30-years-deceased wife Cecily (Susan Hart) greeting him to inform him that he has 24 hours to commit a good deed. Having thus counterbalanced a life of miserable bastardy, he will be admitted into Heaven and given eternal youth, the better to frolic about sexily with his wife among the angels. Cecily, in life, was the Girl in the Invisible Bikini, a trapeze artist whose outfit gave the illusion of a hole right through her body; it does not mean, as AIP surely wanted the teen boys out there to think, that her outfit itself was translucent and you could see all her bits and pieces, as if that was ever going to happen in a cheesy teen comedy from 1966, anyway.

This is all known; this is all fairly easy to tell even from the finished product, in which Karloff is kept firmly segregated from the rest of the cast with a limp "you can't leave the crypt, because", and Hart exists in the main film only as a blue-screen effect who often as not pauses the forward flow of time to pull faces at the camera (which is here meant to be Hiram's crystal ball). Plainly, they're foreign objects inserted - clumsily - into the main film. But that leaves the befogging question of what the holy fuck The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini could possibly have looked like in its original incarnation. The version that got released barely has a cogent plot as it is, and most of that is due to the added-in frame. Take that away, and what's left would barely pass muster as a collection of bizarre non-sequiturs, scenes of random chaos thrown in just for the hell of it. Small wonder that Nicholson and Arkoff threw a fit at the cut that director Don Weis first presented to them: if it was really just a Karloff- and Hart-free version of the same movie, it must have been the most damn inane thing imaginable.

In the final version, what happens is thus: Stokely decides that his one good deed will be to make sure that his venal lawyer, Reginald Ripper (Basil Rathbone) doesn't cheat the three other heirs to his estate out of their fair share: these being Chuck Phillips (Tommy Kirk), Lili Morton (Deborah Walley), and Myrtle Forbush (Patsy Kelly), the last of whom is a former lover of the deceased, the first two whose relationship to him is revealed only in a single line, not even one given particular prominence, deep into the movie. It doesn't really matter, of course; the point was solely to get the requisite Frankie & Annette knock-offs into a parody of the "old dark house" genre that hadn't been culturally relevant nearly recently enough in '66 to justify the treatment it receives here. Meanwhile, Myrtle's nephew Bobby (Aron Kincaid) takes up her invitation to bring his friends along for a pool party in the sprawling Stokely mansion, which gives us the necessary injection of beach party shenanigans into the horror-comedy. Ripper, for his part, has invited a different set of guests: J. Sinister Hulk (Jesse White), his trusty goon, along with Princess Yolanda (Bobbi Shaw) and Chicken Feather (Benny Rubin), a pair of traveling assassins carting along a caged gorilla named Monstro (George Barrows). Following them is hapless biker Eric Von Zipper (Harvey Lembeck), and his marginally less hapless gang the Rat Pack, hunting down Yolanda, with whom the boss fell in love the moment she pulled him from a waterlogged bike accident.

That's just the set-up; and it leaves us without a clear protagonist or even a conflict: between Chuck and Ripper? Not till the end. Between Bobby and Ripper's nearly-blind daughter, Sinistra (Quinn O'Hara)? No, that's clearly a B-plot. Is it about the inevitable romance between Chuck and Lili? Again, not really until the end. Basically, it feels like Weis and screenwriters Louis M. Heyward and Elwood Ullman were just throwing insanity at the screen and hoping that it was enough of a cartoon freakshow to carry itself over that way. It's not, of course; Weis was no William Asher, whose smutty sense of humor and warped creativity made the bulk of the beach movies entertainingly fizzy instead of just daft. If anything, The Ghost in the Invisibile Bikini proves even less inspired than Weis's Pajama Party, which at least had Funicello's acerbic performance to lend it some kind of anything. This movie mostly just flares out, with the comedy feeling intensely strained and methodical, like somebody trying to do manic farce by studying it really, really hard, instead of intuitively grasping how to raise that kind of energy and playfulness. The only time the film builds up any momentum at all is in the third act, and there it's the wrong kind - it's that dreadful '60s-style wacky chase comedy that has aged worse than just about anything else form that decade of cinema.

Helping matters out not at all are the actors, limp and pathetic almost to a man: Kirk was such a pathetically whitebread lead, even compared to somebody as antiseptic as Frankie Avalon, and he's far from the blandest member of the cast, to say nothing of the worst (that's surely Hart, Nicholson's wife, whom he kept trying to make a star to no avail). Rubin is maybe the most depressing, playing a cod-Indian role that was meant to be a cod-Indian role for Buster Keaton, who fortunately died in time to avoid taking the part; it's an obvious lift from Pajama Party, and it makes it clear just how much Keaton actually was able to bring to such a thankless part. His status as silent icon is filled by Francis X. Bushman, the great leading man of the 1910s, making his last screen appearance in a part so slight I couldn't even stuff it into a plot synopsis; meanwhile, the role of "gives a better performance than the part deserves" falls to Karloff, who seems entirely unfazed by the shit he's asked to do and say, after so long in the AIP trenches, and the amount of class that he brings to bear makes it even worse that he's so clearly part of a different movie.

The whole thing is just so shitty. Shitty and boring. It's comedy made by director with no facility for it, and a tendency to underline, rather than disguise, the cheapness of the production. Audiences responded in kind: the beach movies would surely not have lasted much longer anyway (surfing was dead as a fad in America at large, and AIP was looking to drop comedy for horror and a brief run of biker films), but this film's meager box-office performance sealed the deal. Nicholson and Arkoff were brilliant businessmen, after all; the second the realised that people no longer liked something, they stopped making it, and The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini is very much worthy of being disliked by the largest possible number of people.

Reviews in this series
Beach Party (Asher, 1963)
Muscle Beach Party (Asher, 1964)
Bikini Beach (Asher, 1964)
Pajama Party (Weis, 1964)
Beach Blanket Bingo (Asher, 1965)
Ski Party (Rafkin, 1965)
How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (Asher, 1965)
The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (Weis, 1966)

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BEACH PARTIES: STUFF AND NONSENSE

How to Stuff a Wild Bikini is a film of lasts: the last of the American International beach party movies directed by the series' animating spirit, William Asher; the last starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, no longer resembling teenagers even to the minute degree they did in the earliest films of the run, but still standing in for a certain sense of lingering post-Kennedy youthful idealism and innocence. The one thing it conspicuously isn't the last of, is that it's not the last AIP beach movie, for James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff were too good at scraping money off the bottom of a barrel to let their great cash cow die off just because everybody involved in making it had moved on to better things.

It's also the fifth of the damn things to come out in just a 23-month span, sixth if we count the Asher- and Avalon-free spin-off Pajama Party, and it's not remotely surprising that a long-delayed fatigue kicked in, and hard. Perhaps it's the case that Asher and his co-writer Leo Townsend had used up all their best ideas on Beach Blanket Bingo, which came out earlier in 1965 and represents by nearly universal acclaim the highest peak of the beach movie cycle, both at AIP and among their many competitors. Certainly, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini isn't remotely at the level of that movie, which it openly pillages it for ideas - not in the way that all of the beach party films recycle narrative conceits and basically re-tell the original Beach Party of 1963, either. That's just following formula; the whole fun lies in seeing how the new movie will bend itself around to do interesting new things while working out the exact same conflicts and narrative beats. That's traditional. No, what's going on in Wild Bikini is that it's copy sequences and gags directly from its immediate predecessor, and even having the characters call attention to it in one scene; it's as clear a sign of creative exhaustion as you could want from a movie that's plainly run out of gas even without such metatextual evidence.

The action begins in the south Pacific, where Frankie (Frankie Avalon) is doing a stint in the Naval reserve. Petrified that his girlfriend Dee Dee (Annette Funicello) is having as much fun fooling around back in California as he is in Tahiti, he cuts a deal with local witch doctor Bwana (Buster Keaton) to spy on Dee Dee for him, which Bwana does by sending a magical pelican to wander around the beach, stalking her. In the meantime, he has his studiously unseen daughter (eventually played, in a genuinely fun cameo, by Elizabeth Montgomery, Asher's then-wife and star of Bewitched) create a magically perfect woman to drop in among the beach kids and distract all the boys from so much as looking at Dee Dee.

This backfires instantly, when the woman in question, Cassandra (Beverly Adams) immediately falls for Ricky (Dwayne Hickman), who finds her loose, wanton ways a turn-off, and instead decides to pursue the most visibly frigid woman on the beach. Who would, of course, be that same Dee Dee. As for who the hell Ricky is, he's been selected by adman J. Peachmont "Peachy" Keane (Mickey Rooney) as the new face of the All-American Teen Biker, what with the tides of history turning back towards motorcycles and away from surfing. A metanarrative that Wild Bikini deserves credit for bringing in, given that this is exactly what was happening in teen culture at that moment, and it would only be a couple of years before AIP was heavily investing in biker movies itself, abandoning the beach films cold after 1966.

The point is, Peachy needs a girl to go alongside his boy, and Cassandra is plainly it; but she's already become the object of affection of a real biker, albeit a supremely terrible one: Eric Von Zipper (Harvey Lembeck), who immediately decides to supplant Ricky as the new face of Teen Biking, urgently declaring himself the ideal boy next door, with the make-up artists doing their bit to make Lembeck look every inch of his 42 years, in case we missed the joke.

There is, in other words, a shitload of plot in Wild Bikini, and you will observe that not a huge amount of it centers around Dee Dee, and basically none around Frankie at all. In the latter case, this is supposedly because Avalon demanded too much money and was smacked down by a demotion to a cameo (and not even a cameo mentioned on the poster!), though it's at least as likely that he was simply too busy starring in Sergeant Deadhead and Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine for AIP around the same time, films dedicated to the project of finding ways to keep the beach movies alive in the face of a culture that was turning on the surfing fad that had birthed the beach movies in the first place. Funicello, meanwhile, was pregnant, necessitating costumes that were powerfully unsexy and not at all appropriate for beachwear, and perhaps as a direct result of her condition, she appeared to have aged five years in the months since Beach Blanket Bingo, and looked positively foolish cavorting with young adults who themselves were a touch on the old side to convincingly play teens.

No Annette & Frankie, then, and that takes with it most of the reason that any of the beach movies "work": they all have pleasures totally unrelated to the central couple, but the pretext, and the justification, is that tart relationship at the middle of all the movies, fun and flirty and laced with the threat of imminent sex. Take that away - and replace the likably dim Avalon with the painfully anodyne Hickman, who cannot remotely keep up with Funicello's acid-flecked line deliveries in their so-called banter - and you sacrifice all the dramatic spine of movies that, even at their best, had absolutely no dramatic spine to spare.

To replace them: nothing. Nothing but death rattles, far as the eye can see. Left to retread all his best moments from Beach Blanket Bingo, Lembeck is the worst he's been in any of the movies; Keaton, red-eyed and sagging and stuck with cartoon-inspired sight gags far beneath his talents, is just heartbreaking to watch; Rooney is saddled with the absolute worst dialogue of a movie that tortures the language far too much for jokes that don't work, and even though I cannot typically stand Rooney, I still find it tragic how much this movie wastes all of the talents he does have. The songs are grueling, insipid book numbers that have completely abandoned the last inch of surf rock for something perfectly anonymous and trivial; Asher's direction includes very little of the absurdist invention of his best work, relying instead on repetitive slapstick, which is totally fucking insane when you recall that this is the beach party movie with actual fucking magic in it. It should be a field day for cartoon physics, not just one gag played out four times where steam comes out of Buster Keaton's ears.

It is not a complete wash. The opening credits are fantastic: claymation done by Art Clokely, creator of The Gumby Show and Davey and Goliath, neither of which remotely prepare one for the abstract geometry and organic fluidity of of the titles and the shapes and half-formed bodies beneath them; it's closer to Jan Švankmajer than anything resembling American children's television. And Cassandra's titular wild bikini, before she inhabits it, is a floating effect drawn by former Disney animator and director Jack Kinney, who gives even the empty swimwear personality and sensuality in just a few well-made frames.

But boy, when you have to start name-dropping animators to explain why a beach party movie isn't an utter morass of boring, stupid jokes and junky sex humor, that alone tells us the crushing scale of the failure involved, y'know?

Reviews in this series
Beach Party (Asher, 1963)
Muscle Beach Party (Asher, 1964)
Bikini Beach (Asher, 1964)
Pajama Party (Weis, 1964)
Beach Blanket Bingo (Asher, 1965)
Ski Party (Rafkin, 1965)
How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (Asher, 1965)
The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (Weis, 1966)

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BEACH PARTIES: RIGHT BLANKET, WRONG MISS

The fourth "true" film of American International's beach series, Beach Blanket Bingo, is also all but universally regarded as the best, not by any little margin, either; and after a fashion, it is the last one before the wheels fell off entirely, for it was the last time that Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello were romantic co-leads. But there is nothing valedictory about the film - for indeed, nobody knew at this point that Avalon would be reduced to a glorified cameo in the next picture - which comes by its stature not by attempting to draw the arc of its characters' stories to a close (what arc?), but by hitting that wonderful point where the people responsible for cranking out movies like fast food hamburgers have run out of ideas and just start throwing any and all shit at the wall, to see what sticks; but not yet to the point where they obviously resent what they're doing, and themselves for doing it.

Basically, this means two things above all: skydiving and mermaids. And if there's anything that says, "we've hit the 'fuck it' point" like throwing a mermaid right on in your teen beach party/surfer movie, I'm quite sure that I don't know what it is, nor do I seriously entertain the notion that it actually exists. Beach Blanket Bingo is pretty damn hard to top for sheer wackiness, with director and co-writer (with Leo Towsend, writing his second of three beach movies) William Asher really opening up and letting whatever idea seemed to be worthwhile play out onscreen merrily, free of fussy notions about story logic, character logic, or physics. Think that it was fun when Pajama Party threw some gags based on cartoon physics in there? Beach Blanket Bingo yawns at that: Beach Blanket Bingo has an entire third act inspired in equal measure by silent serial melodrama and the more recent cartoons that were parodying those exact same melodramas - there is an honest-to-God sawmill sequence, with the pretty blonde about to be split down the middle if the heroes don't get there in time. The heroes being in this case both the surfers and the bikers, led as always by Harvey Lembeck's utterly hopeless Eric Von Zipper, who gets more to do in this film than ever before - even his very own musical number! - though of course the bikers are idiot jerkfaces who get their comeuppance in one of the most surreal split-screen gags ever performed in an American movie: I would not dare to dream of spoiling it, but you'd expect to see it happen to Daffy Duck, not a flesh-and-blood human, and the juxtaposition here is manic and marvelous.

Nominally, this is hung upon a plot, and the nominal plot is thus: during their latest summer trip to the beach (the film opened in April, 1965, the third year of the series), Frankie (Avalon) and Dee Dee (Funicello) once again find themselves quarreling over unwanted flirtations and infidelities, but it's not the obvious suspect, a sexy pop singer named Sugar Kane (Linda Evans) - one of the few outright mistakes of the script lies in stealing a gag from Some Like It Hot, which couldn't have seemed like a safe target even as early as '65 - who initially seems to be drifting into Frankie's affections, but ends up pursuing the surfing gang's resident idiot, Bonehead (Jody McCrea, like Lembeck given far more to do than in other movies in the series). In fact, Frankie and Dee Dee are being tag-teamed by Bonnie (Deborah Walley) and Steve (John Ashley, who had to this point been a good guy in these movies), a pair of skydiving instructors employed by the latest identity of Don Rickles's series-spanning huckster, here named Big Drop. Frankie goes skydiving to make Dee Dee jealous; Dee Dee goes skydiving to make Frankie jealous; meanwhile, Sugar's manager Bullets (Paul Lynde) is ineffectively attempting to turn every single situation into an opportunity to promote his star in front of big-time newspaper gossip columnist Earl Wilson (playing himself).

Also, Buster Keaton chases Bobbi Shaw all around the beach, the both of them occasionally pausing long enough so that he can do a few seconds of immaculately-timed physical comedy, and perhaps briefly confusing the teenagers necking at the drive-in, wondering who this old dude is with the unusually grave expression and far more dignity than it feels he ought to have. I'faith, I do like him better in Pajama Party, where he at least got more screentime and anything that didn't have to do with chasing after a beach bunny. But I still like him here more than his embarrassing final screen credit, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. So it is what it is.

Every beach party movie since Beach Party was first and foremost an exercise in silliness, but none prior to Beach Blanket Bingo was so transparently an excuse for riffing: Rickles dropping any pretense of his character and just doing a few minutes of his acerbic stand-up (and confirming, in the process, that Rickles's comedy has not survived the passage of a half of a century very well); musical numbers that start and stop out of nowhere; the sudden, near-complete replacement of surf culture with skydiving, even skydiving with unusually well-integrated stock footage. In '65, the surf fad as it extended outside of California was starting to wind down pretty heavily, so it certainly makes sense that a company as merciless in its adoption and abandonment of pop culture ephemera as AIP would be on the leading edge of replacing the last fad, though I hardly need point out that skydiving never even briefly became a thing on a national level like surf rock did, and I do not take this to be proof that James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff missed the boat, but that Beach Blanket Bingo absolutely was meant to be taken for a completely loopy, farce, totally divorced from any kind of stable reality.

That sounds like a bad thing, but in reality, this is easily the most consistently entertaining movie in the series, one of the most entertaining teen movies of the 1960s, in fact. Or at least, it's so weird in so many ways that it's never even a little bit boring, which is frankly just as good. From putting an annoying comic side character in the center of a paranormal love triangle, to making fun of Avalon and Funicello for visibly looking much too old to play lovesick teenagers, to including the best slate of songs in the franchise (the title theme is the best song in the series, and the leads' bouncy love duet is a fair #2 for me), this is a film that is pumped to the gills with energy, and Asher's handling of the visuals with cinematographer Floyd Crosby is constantly kinetic and upbeat, a perfect comparison to the free-for-all writing and constant barrage of deeply corny, rarely funny, always zippy jokes. It's a shame that it lacks the candy-colored palette and exuberant raunchiness of Beach Party, but in all other ways, this is head and shoulders above its peers: an encapsulation of all the frantic goofiness of its era with only the good cheer and high spirits, none of the grating zaniness, none of the tedious slapstick. It's a nutsy romp, and it doesn't give any shit about anything, and there's so much energy that I don't even know what to do with it all.

Reviews in this series
Beach Party (Asher, 1963)
Muscle Beach Party (Asher, 1964)
Bikini Beach (Asher, 1964)
Pajama Party (Weis, 1964)
Beach Blanket Bingo (Asher, 1965)
Ski Party (Rafkin, 1965)
How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (Asher, 1965)
The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (Weis, 1966)

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BEACH PARTIES: JUST AFTER EIGHT, WE'LL CONGREGATE

It is a matter of debate amongst people whose priorities are severely misplaced whether 1964's Pajama Party is, properly speaking, a part of American International Pictures' beach party franchise or not. It ports over nearly the entire core cast of those films, but nearly all of them are playing different characters. It incorporates Southern California beaches into the story, but that's not really the setting, and that deprives the film of both the surfing stock footage and surf rock that are so tremendously important to the overall effect of the beach movies. On the other hand, AIP obviously wanted to connect the film with its popular series, which was at that point the company's only teen movie concern as it began dedicating itself more and more to horror, and both the title and the ad campaign are clearly meant to evoke the beach movies, even if the content is a little bit askew.

What this leaves us with is a swell laboratory experiment, that does not try to answer the question, "What happens if somebody besides William Asher makes a beach party movie for AIP?", though it ends up doing just that. Pajama Party, you see, was directed by Don Weis, almost exclusively a TV director up to that point, and while I had no small belief that Asher's contributions to the films are easily overlooked and of considerable importance to the ultimate feel and effect of the movies, it's pleasant of Weis to come along and prove me entirely right. Indeed, of the two men prominently missing from Pajama Party, Asher turns out to be leave the far more debilitating gap than Frankie Avalon, who appears in an extended cameo as the leader of the Martian military, leaving it to Tommy Kirk to be Funicello's designated love interest, and reveals in the process just how essential a perfectly plain, vanilla prettyboy with no discernible acting talent can end up being to create a very particular sort of atmosphere.

Allow me to stop teasing and just say it: Pajama Party isn't very good, which is to begin with not much of a surprise, since none of the AIP beach movies are very good - if we are being objective and totally free of sentiment, nothing by AIP is very good - and expecting any random one of them to be suddenly great cinema is to profoundly misunderstand what they are and why the existed. But "good" is somewhat to the side of what a sensible viewer does hope to find with the beach movies, which is a bountiful sense of cartoonish whimsy, time capsule sociology, and shameless delight in bouncy music and bouncy... people.

Pajama Party at least manages to get part of that right: with writer Louis M. Heyward avowedly structuring scenes and gags according to the logic and rhythm of a four-panel comic strip, the film is unabashedly cartoonish, and in a good way. One of the best things about the beach movies is their well-developed sense of the utterly silly, and the flights of pure fantasy, and Pajama Party reaches new heights in this regard, whether it's the fact that the plot - such as it is, and that ain't much - hinges on an invasion force from Mars, or the early gag where a pair of teens enthusiastically Watusi their way out over a pool, look down, realise what they've done, and fall in, in flawless Wile E. Coyote style. Realism not ever being a concern, Pajama Party still represents a major jump ahead for the franchise in this direction, and it sets us on a merry path that will, in due course, arrive at places like Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, and The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini.

What the film lacks totally is bounciness, the poppy energy that tends to make the utterly trivial nonsense in all of these movies seem like charmingly simplistic fun and not just careless trash. For it a thin line between dumb that is fun and dumb that is just dumb, and the beach franchise made a habit of staying on the fun side of that line while leaning as far over as possible. That, I think, was the result of Asher's intelligently loose direction, which felt uncommonly in-the-moment considering how far he was from the material's target audience; there is a sense, watching his movies, that he genuinely respects the daft, made-up culture he's depicting and the teenagers he is making it for. With Weis, in Pajama Party, I simply do not get the impression that he really understood or liked what he was doing, and where Asher's camera is constantly right in with the kids, Weis and cinematographer Floyd Crosby stay locked in wide and medium-wide shots, occasionally darting in for a leering shot of some comely teenage bosom or wiggling hips, and even those have the feeling of something put in according to a system, because the movie needs sex in it, than because the filmmakers have an intuitive sense for how the energy of their film is flowing.

It doesn't help that Pajama Party is so unfocused: the absence of Avalon means the absence of the tart, somewhat nasty relationship between his character and Funicello's, and also the low-boil sexuality that came with it, and every single movie in the series was founded on that relationship. There is here no organising A-plot, just a grab-bag of plot strands: Go Go (Kirk) is on a mission from Mars to study the teenagers of Earth and thereby bring a report back to military leader Socum (Avalon) and Big Bang (Don Rickles, playing a sort of variation on his stock character in the series). Meanwhile, a gang of crooks led by J. Sinister Hulk (Jesse White) is attempting to find the rumored huge cache of money hidden in the home of charmingly dotty Aunt Wendy (Elsa Lanchester), whose nephew Big Lunk (Jody McCrea) is sort of dating Connie but not really, especially when he falls in love with Helga (Bobbi Shaw), the buxom Swedish member of the criminal gang. Go Go is taken in by Aunt Wendy, who thinks nothing of having a Martian in the house, though she cautions him to pretend that he's a human named George to everybody else. And just to make sure that there's a traditional fight scene to end things, the Rat Pack motorcycle gang led by the hapless Eric Von Zipper (Harvey Lembeck) has a grudge against the boys' volleyball team that makes up the male contingent of the teen orgy currently staying at Wendy's place.

None of this gels, which is fair, because nobody involved seems to think that it does gel. It's just free-for-all slapstick, disconnected from character concerns of any sort (the romantic travails of the teens are underdeveloped to the point of non-existence). There's a place where this could work, even a place in the AIP teen movie firmament; but Weis doesn't direct it with the kind of loopy fun that would help to get the audience in the same place as the comedy, and so it all just seems shrill. I've never been so grateful in any of these films for Lembeck, I can tell you that; perversely, the absurd comic figure of the other films has a grounding effect here, since he is clearly familiar with it more than anybody else is familiar with anything, and while some of the actors try harder than others (Lanchester especially is hellbent on having a fun time), nobody hits the right tone consistently. And Kirk is a hurtfully bland hero, with no meaningful chemistry between him and his co-star (I have not seen the same year's Disney-produced Funicello/Kirk vehicle The Misadventures of Merlin Jones, and maybe they have something that works there; but I tend to doubt it), nor enough of an Everyboy simplicity that he carries his solo material any better.

The one actor who possibly gives Lembeck a run for his money as the saving grace of anything at all, for a much different reason, is the unlikely figure of silent comedy icon Buster Keaton, making the first of four AIP appearances as a unfathomably tasteless slapstick Native American called Chief Rotten Eagle, part of the thieving gang. Sound comedy was not friendly to Keaton, whose routines where entirely physical and whose acting style was based in a studied non-response that seemed just grotesque when dialogue was happening around him; his career had been long washed up by '64, which is undoubtedly how he got to this pass. Still, there have been few men in all of screen comedy who can even think about competing his level of native talent, and it is astounding, if not necessarily pleasurable, to watch as he bends all his years of training and knowledge on building this one-joke caricature with intelligence and consistency, reacting and non-reacting with exactly the precision and gravity he brought to bear on any of his best films from the '20s. It's a sharp, somewhat mystifying conflict between style and content that is nevertheless interesting in its way, though while Lembeck and, to a smaller degree, Lanchester benefit the film by yoking its dizziness to something recognisable, Keaton arguably damages it even more by operating so massively far above the material that he calls that much more attention to how reedy it is.

All of this results in a film that's not much fun to watch at all: it doesn't look as fun as the earlier movies, the music (stripped of surf-rock overtones) isn't as fun, the actors aren't having enough fun. With "fun" being the primary excuse for these films existing, that can be rightfully described as a debilitating flaw. But that's to be expected with sausage-factory film production of the sort that AIP practiced: the casts and crews would tire of this stuff, and four films into a seven-film cycle, Pajama Party is a natural place for that burnout to first make itself known.

Reviews in this series
Beach Party (Asher, 1963)
Muscle Beach Party (Asher, 1964)
Bikini Beach (Asher, 1964)
Pajama Party (Weis, 1964)
Beach Blanket Bingo (Asher, 1965)
Ski Party (Rafkin, 1965)
How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (Asher, 1965)
The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (Weis, 1966)

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BEACH PARTIES: ALL THE CHICKS ARE BIKINI-CLAD

Bitter, scrupulous honesty compels us to admit that Bikini Beach has an alarmingly defective screenplay; by which I do not mean "The script of Bikini Beach compares unfavorably to the script of Network", or something dumb like that, because fucking duh. I mean, even by the standards of the American International beach party movies, Bikini Beach has a broken script that fails at levels you wouldn't even assume it might fail. And yet, despite this, Bikini Beach is the best film of the series to that point, a welcome course-correction after the bland Muscle Beach Party, while largely copying the details of the genre-originating Beach Party with some very important redirected emphases. Basically, Bikini Beach is where the wacky musical comedy stylings of the beach movies, having fully exhausted itself after one (let alone two) entries, went for broke into the wide world of absurdity and surrealism. It's not as wholeheartedly deranged as some of its successors would be, but it's far, far stranger than either of its predecessors, and the bizarre energy thus generated makes it easily the most likable and arresting of the three, even if it's a complete flop even on the level of being a teen sex farce.

The action takes us to summer once again, with the gang - and after three films, they're comfortably "the gang", people you're excited to see again, people you kind of wish would stop hanging around, and all - returning to the same beach as before, presumably, though there never do seem to be the same features from film to film, and the small number of hangout spots that carried over between the first two movies are gone now. Nonetheless, a handful of lines make much too big a point of building intra-film continuity.

ANYWAY, IT'S SUMMER, and Frankie (Frankie Avalon) and Dee Dee (Annette Funicello) have apparently reached detente in their longstanding feud about relationship commitment, because she doesn't make a snarky comment about him marrying her even once. Indeed, Dee Dee seems a whole lot looser and more interesting this time, which makes it disappointing that she gets so little screentime. But there's a lot of story vying for attention, what with British music sensation Peter Royce Bentley* (also Avalon), better known by his stage name Potato Bug, having set up his summertime vacation on the same beach, and local business owner and newspaper publisher Harvey Huntington Honeywagon III (Keenan Wynn) deciding to throw all his influence at convincing the local populace that the teens are literally as primitive as his beloved chimp Clyde (Janos Prohaska), who can surf, drag-race, and dance as well as any of them. In this, Honeywagon meets with the surprisingly intense resistence of local non-teen Vivien Clements (Martha Hyer), though he gains an excruciatingly unwelcome ally in the body of incompetent biker gang leader Eric Von Zipper (Harvey Lembeck), back from whatever hole he'd been hiding in all through Muscle Beach Party, and being sufficient all by himself to make this film better than that one.

So, here's what I mean by a defective script: Bikini Beach can't decide whether it's primarily about the venal Honeywagon, or the deliriously wacky Potato Bug and the resentment he engenders (for, obviously, he takes an immediate fancy to Dee Dee, setting up many Avalon vs. Avalon face-offs), and it really does not give any amount of a shit. Which is just as well, given that the film functions much better a series of comic moments than as a narrative with momentum and all, but it's still an immense drag on the film pretty much every time that Honeywagon and Clements - a meaner and far less culturally fascinating retread of the Robert Cummings/Dorothy Malone material from Beach Party - show up to pull focus from everything around them, all of it much more entertaining. The fact that Honeywagon's surname - a film industry nickname for portable toilets - is made such a constant source of delight for the screenwriting team of William Asher, Leo Townsend, and Robert Dillon tells us most of what we need to know about the overall level of sophistication with which this subplot is handled.

Everything else, though, is terrific - very stupid and inane most of the time, but terrific. That's mostly because Bikini Beach turns into a straight-up cartoon, completing a journey that wasn't very far for the franchise to go in the first place. Obviously, once you get a chimp racing dragsters and dancing the Watusi, you've landed pretty securely in a proudly ludicrous place, but that's not even the only thing about Bikini Beach operating at a level that can hardly be related to recognisable human behavior, even to the degree that Beach Party could. A lot of this resides in the film's manifestly odd parody of the British Invasion in the form of Potato Bug, who is an overt parody of the Beatles - his song that we hear is full of "She Loves You"-esque oohs and talk of holding hands - but who isn't played by Avalon remotely as anything that even the squarest 1964 viewer might have mistaken for the Beatles. If anything, he's channeling British comedian Terry-Thomas, and his accent is far enough off the mark that I genuinely can't tell if it's meant to be the British or American stereotypes about the British that's coming under attack.

(Also, there's something ineffably sad about a movie anchored in '60s surf culture that so airily dismisses the artistic integrity of the Beatles; not that in '64, anybody could have imagined the ultimate scale of the Beatles' aesthetic triumph and influence, but it feels like watching a fly snort derisively at the Space Shuttle anyway).

More than just one chimp and one incredibly broad caricature of Britishness - enough to make Austin Powers look refined and subtle - Bikini Beach simply thrives on a constant stream of unreality. The wacky cartoon sound effects that had always been part of Asher's directorial toolkit are increased here to heights unimagined by the previous film, and even the disconnect between the various plot threads - and the disconnect within plot threads, as when the primary conflicts of Dee Dee's flirtation with Potato Bug, and Honeywagon's persecution of the teens, are resolved practically offscreen - contributes to the sense that nothing happening is actually real, just moments that only mean anything in relation to themselves. Frequently, this works: the best moments have enough of a hokey time capsule charm that they're perfectly delightful, with Funicello being far more fun and spiky and personable than in the earlier movies, and the best surfing stock footage in the franchise showing up, and Don Rickles giving a vastly sillier and freer performance than he gave in Muscle Beach Party, while playing nominally the same character.

Frequently, it doesn't: the songs are pretty anonymous, not that any of AIP's attempts at launching a music empire involved genuinely good music. But the lyrics reach a new height of strained banality, and surf rock had already begun to play itself out by '64; only the energy of the performances keep the musical numbers from drying up entirely. The third act descends into that terrible trap of so many '60s comedies: the protracted chase scene, this one eventually turning into a virtual copy of the slapstick fight scene from Beach Party.

I mean, let's be fair: Bikini Beach isn't "good". It's just tremendously, wonderfully goofy, giving its perfectly likeable vanilla leads a rare chance to act as daffy as the shenanigans around them, even as those shenanigans are elevated almost to surrealism. It's a curious, strange time capsule, that excellently captures the best aspects of AIP's well-honed pandering to teen audiences, while also showcasing what a sufficiently driven - or at least bored - filmmaker could do when given enough of a free reign by the AIP masters to make something far too unique and exuberantly zany to be as trashy and disposable as you might suppose.

Reviews in this series
Beach Party (Asher, 1963)
Muscle Beach Party (Asher, 1964)
Bikini Beach (Asher, 1964)
Pajama Party (Weis, 1964)
Beach Blanket Bingo (Asher, 1965)
Ski Party (Rafkin, 1965)
How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (Asher, 1965)
The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (Weis, 1966)

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BEACH PARTIES: GOTTA HUSTLE THE CHICKS, NOW

There were many knock-offs of American International's Beach Party, the groundbreaking surf musical starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello; but AIP's own first knock-off (for ripping itself off was one of the things the company did best) was Muscle Beach Party, released in the spring of 1964. Of course "knock-off" isn't the word that the film prefers me to use; it would rather go by "sequel", though the narrative connections between the various beach party movies hardly matter, being limited mostly to the fact that Avalon and Funicello have the same character names throughout. MBP makes a few thin nods in the direction of continuity that other films in the franchise lack - Avalon's character, challengingly named "Frankie", is aware that the central conflict between him and Dee Dee (Funicello) is yet another iteration of an old fight, and Morey Amerstdam's club owner Cappy shows up here for the second and last time, making him one of the few non-teen characters to put in appearances in multiple films - but part of the generic concept is that there's no room for developing plot: it's yet another adventure on the beach for vacationing kids, the kind that barely even seems to matter to them while it's playing out.

In this case, it's Easter vacation (once again leading to my observation that the popularity of surf culture in places where it couldn't exist - places where you'd die of hypothermia if you jumped in the water in March, for example - is just damned fascinating and strange), and Frankie and Dee Dee and a whole lot of familiar faces are going to their favorite beach to sleep in the safely sex-segregated house they've rented, surfing and cuddling during the day and attending convenient Dick Dale and the Del-Tones concerts at night (in fact, Dale traveled with in their convoy). Meanwhile, the same beach is being used by Jack Fanny (Don Rickles), gym owner and personal trainer who is spending his time sculpting a cadre of men into impeccable physical specimens, with his pride and joy being Mr. Galaxy winner Flex Martian (Peter Lupus who, like Flex, was given a fake name: Rock Stevens). Flex has attracted the attention of the stupidly wealth Contessa Giuliana Giotto-Borgini (Luciana Paluzzi), who has ordered her rich business manager S.Z. Matts (Buddy Hackett) to buy Mr. Galaxy for her collection. While waiting for that deal to go through, she naturally falls head over heels for Frankie, who reciprocates a little too readily for Dee Dee's liking, particularly with them having had another "I want to get married!" / "I want to surf and have fun!" spat. Incidentally, for all the obvious and immediate ways that these movies are clearly time capsule pieces (the colors, the slang, the music), nothing has aged them as thoroughly as the spectacle of what I imagine to be 19- or 20-year-olds having an argument about getting married.

Let us be frank: whatever charms Beach Party has - I think that they are fairly immense, at that - they are not possessed by its first sequel. The free-for-all sense of absurdity that animates the later films, and is spotted in a limited form in the original, really isn't here at all, except in a reprise of Candy Johnson's character stopping men in their tracks with comic sound effects. The candy-colored '60s iconography isn't entirely muted (you can only do so much, with a surf movie, and the Ed Roth credits are a divine piece of period pop culture ephemera), but it's also not as eye-catchingly captured by cinematographer Harold E. Wellman and art director Lucius O. Croxton as their predecessors, Kay Norton and Daniel Haller. Most disappointingly, Muscle Beach Party is more chaste: the original film, with its downright smutty enthusiasm for depicting teenagers as sexual beings, was as interesting a sociological time capsule as a pop-cultural one, but not only does Muscle Beach Party have less overt sexuality, it even calls attention to itself for having less, with the bifurcated beach house and its concomitant elimination of furtive screwing.

On the other hand, as suggested by its title, Muscle Beach Party is hugely homoerotic, though given the people who made it and especially the studio that paid for it, I can't swear that all of it is intentional. That some of it is intentional seems beyond doubt: Buddy Hackett pulling increasingly odd but invariably approving looks as a line of immaculately-shaped young men in bright pink briefs and capes parade in front of him can't possibly be an accident, assuming that director William Asher had even the least awareness that gay men existed, and working in the film industry, one assumes he must have. And while that's an interesting shift in focus, it's not really something the film does much with at all: lines of dialogue that would require nothing to nudge them in the direction of sounding intensely suggestive are kept firmly neutered, and none of the teen boys in the surfer camp seems to have any sort of latent awareness one way or the other.

That speaks to a problem greater than just "there ought to be some sex in this teen sex picture"; Muscle Beach Party is unusually good at not being about anything, even when it should be. Robert Dillon's screenplay, from a story he co-wrote with Asher, is structurally bizarre and not in any kind of good way: with the surfers, the bodybuilders, and the Contessa serving as three possible points for conflict, the film still struggles to have any kind of story: first the surfers are angry and the bodybuilders and then vice versa, but then the Contessa shows up and there's a damn long stretch of the movie without much of any connection to anything else, as S.Z. Matts and Jack Fanny hash out a business deal (Hackett is in fine form, but Rickles, given an oddly uncharacteristic role, is largely unpleasant), and the teens barely even show up in disconnected cameos. When the film resumes, it's on the back of the Dee Dee-Frankie-Contessa love triangle, and when the bodybuilders return, it's as unexpected and pointless as a celebrity cameo from Peter Lorre, who died only two days before the film's release, and before having a chance to film his promised appearance in the eventual Bikini Beach.

Given that the limited story is already a retread of Beach Party, where the same character beats were worked into the more expansive, wackier outside plot, it's impossible to see this as anything but tepid, paint-by-numbers mechanical storytelling, and while the film goes through the motions well enough - good stock footage surfing, fine surf rock tunes co-written by Beach Boy mastermind Brian Wilson, Frankie and Annette are playing their established characters fine, even if neither one (Frankie especially) has much of anything to do - it is plainly just that: going through the motions. Nobody expects a beach party movie to be a great work of cinematic art, but the least it can do is to offer some good playful romping, and Muscle Beach Party is simply too impersonal to achieve that.

Reviews in this series
Beach Party (Asher, 1963)
Muscle Beach Party (Asher, 1964)
Bikini Beach (Asher, 1964)
Pajama Party (Weis, 1964)
Beach Blanket Bingo (Asher, 1965)
Ski Party (Rafkin, 1965)
How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (Asher, 1965)
The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (Weis, 1966)

Read More