The Beach Girls and the Monster (1965)

Ah, the beach movie.

Fun on a sunny beach in the summertime with Frankie and Annette, rock and roll songs, non-stop dance parties, funny guest stars dropping in every so often, colorful antics all day long and breezy romance into the night.

A winning formula, if a tad on the goofy side, that served a few studios long and well.

In fact, you know what the only thing is that could possibly screw up a beach movie?

Film it in black and white.

The brightness? Gone. The frivolity? Gone. 75% of the inherent entertainment value? Long gone, Pete Tong. You might as well set it during late fall and have Death out on the beach with his chess set, looking for a game.

Or better yet, make it a monster movie.

See, not every studio could shell out the extra bucks for a good cast, a fun script or sunny direction (or color film, for that matter), so they instead used the resources they had at hand, threw in a monster to terrorize the gyrating beach bunnies, and there you go.

And don't you know, black and white filming elevates the dramatic tension too, not to mention the fact that you can film at any time of the year - not necessarily summer - since black and white makes the goosebumps harder to notice on swim-suited beach goers in less-than-warm weather.

Economical.

They did it for Del Tenney's "classic" The Horror of Party Beach (see what I did with the quotes there?) - the first horror musical, as they call it. And they did it again for our little surfin' bird here: The Beach Girls and the Monster.

The problem with this idea, however, was not in the basic concept, but in another area - an area in which BOTH films suffered.

More on that in a sec, but let's get this out of the way first:

A young girl is killed at a rockin' beach in Malibu, California. Professor Otto Lindsay (Jon Hall) suspects that it is some form of mutated fish. However, his son Richard (Arnold Lessing), who was a good friend of the girl, thinks that it is a madman who has a grudge against Richard and his friends. Soon the list of victims grows to include Rich's nasty step-mom Vicky (Sue Casey) and his friend Mark (Walker Edmiston) who was crippled in an auto accident. What is this monster? Who will be the next victim?

"Hey, isn't that kinda simplistic", the seasoned b-movie veteran would say. And they'd be right; this movie clocks in at juuust over an hour. Juuust over an hour of beach frolic and bloodletting. Figure time for a couple of musical numbers (written by Frank Sinatra!...Jr.; one of which, "There's a Monster in the Surf", is warbled by a disembodied lion's head. Yes.), surfing footage, family drama, romantic subplot and "scientific" exposition, that doesn't leave a whole lot of time for The Monster, let alone The Beach Girls.

Once you see The Monster in question, though, maybe you'll realize they might have planned it that way.

To begin with, production on this beach baby would have been nil without the cooperation of Jon Hall; back in the day, he was quite the leading man and his saronged-self was featured in many island movies such as John Ford's classic The Hurricane, White Savage, On the Isle of Samoa and such Technicolor landmarks as Arabian Nights and Cobra Woman.

Along the way, Hall got older and lost those leading man good looks, instead falling back on a lucrative photographic equipment business that specialized in underwater cameras. This proved very successful, as he rented underwater equipment to film studios and occasionally supervised underwater sequences.

In the early Sixties Jon was approached with this script and asked for the use of his underwater cameras. He agreed under three provisions: give him a part (no problem), let him be cinematographer (well, okay) and let him direct.

"Have you ever directed before, Mr. Hall?"

"Well, no."

"In that case, I don't think we could..."

"But you can't use my equipment otherwise."

"...I don't think we could afford to let a talent like yours not step behind the camera!"

And so besides directing and cinematographing, Hall was cast as the oceanographic expert Dr. Lindsay, who deduces what kind of oceanic beast is doing the cutting and slashing, and he is also the daddy-o of Richard, a rockin' teen surfer who feels there is more to life than test tubes and stuff - he just wants to live, man. That work stuff is for squares and losers, he wants to be at one with the waves! ...Or, you know, words to that effect.

Then, subsequently, the good Doc finds himself involved with the titular The Monster of the piece. What a co-inky-dink.

Now, about this Monster: it, for all the world, looks to have been designed by Jim Henson in his "Sesame Street" days. Big googly eyes, pointy head, large goofy mouth with sharp teeth like nacho chips and strands of seaweed dangling off him like tinsel from the worst Christmas tree ever decorated. Yet even with those sharp claws, this gawky thing would be best-suited to make his victims die of a ruptured blood vessel from laughing too hard.

Hey, say what you will; at least it doesn't have hot dogs jammed in its mouth, right, Del Tenney?

Did it make money? Hard to say, since the budget on this would have had to have been minor, looking at the technical aspects of the creature itself, and that the biggest parts are surf footage filler. My guess would be that it at least made back its budget, in spite of the fact that it had everything working against it: not enough color for a beach movie, not enough excitement for a thriller, too much of The Monster and not even the atmosphere of either a beach film OR a horror movie. This is more like a Movie of the Week with scenes from a different (even more stupid) movie spliced in.

I liked it, yes I did, but that goes without saying, except perhaps for the end of the thing. I won't give away anything about it, save for the fact that it's just as bad as the one in Time Walker. Look it up, you'll see what I mean.

Pity poor Jon Hall; this would be the last movie he starred in before he took his life in 1979 to escape the pain and suffering of bladder cancer. Too bad, but at least he was doing what he loved. Never mind that it was in a movie with a murderous Muppet character and Frank Sinatra (Jr.) music.

One last thing; this movie was edited by one Radley Metzger. That name probably doesn't mean a whole lot to you unless, of course, you've seen movies like The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann, Naked Came the Stranger, The Opening of Misty Beethoven and/or Barbara Broadcast. Go look 'em up yourself, I've said too much already.

After you do look him up, then you can make your own sexual metaphor jokes about crashing waves and big monsters and bikini-clad girls shaking around.

At least that way The Beach Girls and the Monster will have SOME context.