A SEA MONSTER SLAUGHTERS TO THE SOUNDS OF A SWINGIN' BEACH PARTY
★★★★☆ (Worth the Watch)
Director: Del Tenney
1964
When The Horror of Party Beach was filmed, the world looked very different. The atomic bomb was on everyone’s mind, a woman’s place was in the home. America was in that awkward phase between the docile “It’s My Party” and “Venus” teeny boppers and the wild hippie teens who would enjoy orgies and every drug under the sun. It was a time when dancing on the beach to rock n’ roll could give your old man the vapors, and even talking to a boy with a motorcycle would get you pregnant—a fate worse than death. It was also a time when you could play on teenagers’ fears of The Bomb by making a movie about a radioactive sea creature who will murder them at their beach party. Maybe I’m just missing one of my favorite childhood movies Back to the Beach, but The Horror of Party Beach did it for me. It’s hilariously bad horror shlock that elevates the genre by also being a musical (“The Zombie Stomp” is part of my Halloween playlist). The quick pace and high body count make up for ridiculous close-ups and lack of acting chops. I can’t imagine how many teens screamed while watching The Horror of Party Beach at the drive-in back in the day.
SPOILERS Hank (John Scott) is a hunky Ken doll in love with the wrong woman. After he and Tina arrive at a party with plenty of surfing and swinging, it doesn’t take long for her to pick a fight so she can run off and flirt with the bad boys on motorcycles. As the troublemaker dances to the tunes of The Del-Aires with her chosen greaser, a crestfallen Hank is comforted by Elaine (Alice Lyon), and there’s a lot of setup here as they discuss his interest in science and her slight interest in him. This little blonde is the sort of girl you want to take home to your mother, so the film is transparent in its message: Elaine is pure and altruistic and is given her own song, while Tina deserves to be eaten by a sea monster with penises coming out of its mouth. It’s been awhile, but I’m pretty sure those are penises. I would love to know what was going on in the costume design because they really can’t be anything else. Anyhow, after a bloody Tina washes up on the shore and wrecks the bash, Hank works with Elaine’s scientist father to find the monster and kill it.
When it comes to our scaly beasts, you don’t have to wait long for the next kill—they follow teens home and even eat an entire slumber party full of young women in what is easily the best scene in the film. There are, of course, glaring problems with The Horror of Party Beach that can’t be waved off—most importantly, Eulabelle (Eulabelle Moore), Elaine’s housekeeper and offensive Mamie character prone to hysterics and voodoo. Thankfully, she doesn’t have many scenes, but she is the hero of the hour. Yes, Eulabelle is the one who inadvertently saves the day, not the silly science we keep hearing about.
Plot holes that open up like sand bubbles (where did the motorcycle gang go?) are other reasons to avoid The Horror of Party Beach, but if you’re a horror fan that looks for absurd historical anomalies in cinema, you won’t be disappointed. There’s not much of a difference in quality between this and a beach bongo movie starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. Instead of Frankie fake surfing to a fake background, we have a band playing a peppy tune as a teenager is gobbled up by a monster that looks like a big chicken.
But The Horror of Party Beach is not all fun and games. Elaine represents a potential little housewife who will cater to her husband’s needs, and Eulabelle represents a stereotype at the edge of the Civil Rights movement. Both of these women are about to have more options. This was a snapshot of a time before there were more serious issues than radiation begetting monsters.
GENRES: Diverse Characters, Monster/Creature, Teens in Peril
NO AI TRAINING: Without in any way limiting the author’s [and publisher’s] exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this website's (nicolinatorres.com) blog posts or publications to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.
Comentarios