Background: This movie, Bikini Beach, Beach Blanket Bingo and more defined the movie career of pop idol Frankie Avalon. Before making this movie, he had an impressive string of hits, charting 31 singles in just 4 years including a few #1s. These days he is arguably more famous for being teamed up with Annette Funicello in a series of breezey, easy going beach movies. It's surprising though that people seem to have forgotten entire about these movies. Most of the Beach series has fewer than 15 user reviews on Netflix. It's possible that I live in a complete pop cultural time warp, but I still think that most people of a certain age have a very specific image of "Frankie And Annette". No one would ever mistake these for classic or even particularly high quality movies, but even with the nostalgia for the '60s that shows like Mad Men and the new Pan Am have inspired, no one seems to care about these movies.
This was a breakout hit for the famed studio American International Pictures who are well known to cheap movie aficionados like myself for putting out a seemingly endless string of truly crummy movies. The studio heads, James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff were masters of making movies with low budgets achieve as much as possible. Arkoff had a system known as "The ARKOFF system" (That was a weird sentence to write). ARKOFF stood for "Action, Revolution, Killing, Oratory, Fantasy, Fornication". He figured out that if a movie had these things, it was bound to achieve at least moderate success. The studio even pioneered the use of focus groups in movies, something most people consider to be pretty terrible these days. The studio is best remembered for the series of Roger Corman (Corman!) directed movie based on Edgar Allen Poe stories, starring Vincent Price. He made 8 of these in four years. Yikes.
Plot: Well, there's going to be a beach party. the viewers learn this through a song sung by Frankie and Annette first thing in the movie. Strangely, even though they're both really excited about the beach party (tonight), they're expecting to have a quiet vacation together, just the two of them. Well, Frankie's expecting this, Annette has other plans though, she invited all their friends to the beach hose too. She does this because she doesn't trust Frankie alone with her. This sets up the main premise of the movie. Frankie desperately wants to fuck Annette. I know her character's name is Delores, but she's just going to be Annette here.
Enter the Professor, the venerable Bob Cummings. He's an anthropologist and he's studying the insanely horny teenagers at the beach. He compares to the other tribes he has studied in the past and comes up with a surprising number of parallels. It should be noted that the professor has a magnificent beard. Frankie hates the fact that Annette won't let him get his grubby hands on her, so he decides to make her jealous by making time with Eva, a vaguely European waitress. Annette decides to get back at him by drawing the shortest straw possible and falling for the much older, much more bearded professor. Prof had previously saved her from a roving biker gang.
The professor slowly starts assimilating himself with this tribe of teenagers. He goes to the beach with Annette and he learns to surf. Because he's a professor, before going out, he does a ton of bullshit math. He crashes instantly and repeatedly. Oops! He forgot to carry the two. Now he's got it though and he mugs straight into the camera. Also, one night when all the other kids are off banging, he shaves his beard. Annette falls further for him now.
The prof knows that he can't be with Delores, and his assistant, Maryanne, yells at him for going native. He concocts a plan to make it seem like he's involved with Maryanne so Delores will back off. And he falls instantly in love with her. Frankie's mad for messing with Delores, so he charges to the prof's hangout. There, he finds all the spying equipment and is, needless to say, outraged. Then there's a pie fight.
Why Was It Forgotten? This one's kind of a puzzle to me. Make no mistake, this movie has not aged well. The plot is paper thin and the characters are really really hard to give even one iota of a shit about. There are scores of criticisms to be made about this movie, but regardless of those this movie was really something at the time. This was just the first of many beach movies that littered the cultural landscape in the 1960s. Frankie Avalon alone made another half dozen of these bad boys. It's possible that the breezey comedy and teenage drama just doesn't mean anything in this day and age.
What Went Right? I've always had a soft spot for surf music, and this movie has surf music coming out the wazoo. Between Frankie Avalon and Dick Dale and the Del-Tones, the hits never stop coming. At least in the first half of the movie, the music more or less dries up in the latter half. The comedy parts actually still work in a certain way too. The jokes are goofy and the sound effects doubly so, but somehow I still found myself laughing. I get the feeling that if you wanted to make a parody of this movie, you could just make a shot-for-shot remake and it would work perfectly. Again, every part of this movie is terribly dated, but tin a strange way it has come back around to being fun.
Also, right at the tail end, there's a great Vincent Price cameo. That always helps.
Verdict: Yeah, I'm surprised I liked it too.
Score: 70%
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