Summer's here, as the old rock song goes, and the time is right...for watching beach movies filled with sand and silliness...and, if you wish to mix beasts with the bikinis, you can also experience...

By DAVE DUGGINS

You know, I keep thinking lately that I’m going to ask Renfield if I can do something different. The last half dozen articles I’ve worked on have all been about bad movies. I mean, really terrible movies. Movies that probably never should have been made. The first couple of articles I wrote for Horror-Wood were…I don’t know, kinda serious. About decent movies, at least.

Just about the time I start thinking that, Renfield emails me and says, "Hey, how about doing this movie?" And I end up thinking, "Oh, yeah, I love that one!" and I’m off again.

Which doesn’t say anything much, except that I have a deep, abiding love for crap. Which leads us into this month’s dreck epic, a movie most of you have probably at least heard of--a flick which manages to jam together the worst elements of the two most popular film genres of the mid Fifties, the beach movie and the horror movie.

It even manages to stick both of those words in the title, just so you know up front what you’re getting.

That’s right, folks … we’re talking The Horror Of Party Beach.

This one was directed by Del Tenney (remember I Eat Your Skin?) and stars a whole bunch of people you’ve never heard of. They all have Frankie and Annette haircuts. A couple of them even sorta look like Frankie and Annette, but they probably couldn’t have gotten the real Frankie and Annette to spit within ten feet of the camera crew for this movie, much less act in it.

Whoever these "teenagers" are, they’re looking a bit long in the tooth for the beach-party jitterbug thing. But hey, age is in the mind, right? Or maybe it’s in the mind of your plastic surgeon.

So here’s the deal. The Evil Industrialist Pigs dump a bunch of garbage cans full of radioactive waste into the ocean. The stuff sinks to the bottom, where it sticks to a human skeleton and turns it into a semi-aquatic monster in the Creature From The Black Lagoon mold--except these guys are more like Creatures from the Cheap Lagoon.

Why it doesn’t affect any of the other marine life in the immediate vicinity is never even dealt with. I suspect that it was because there was no money in the effects budget to show a bunch of giant clams or sharks that can walk on land. Now that would have been cool.

Ah, the special effects. When I was a kid I saw this episode of Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea that had a cool oceanic beastie in it. It was a mold-covered Glad bag with a couple of ping-pong balls for eyes. That’s the first thing I thought of when I saw The Horror Of Party Beach critters--although in this case, some guy was actually wearing the Glad bag.

What do you figure that cost ‘em? About ten dollars, that’s what I’m thinking. A little seaweed around the ping-pong balls. Couple of soda straws. Amazingly thrift-conscious stuff. Makes the monster suits in Humanoids From The Deep look like Oscar-winning effects work.

Isn’t it funny how we keep coming back to the same movies over and over again? I could go off on some pseudo-intellectual tangent about themes common to horror films, but we’re not here to get deep. We’re here to take out the trash.

Anyway, there’s the usual bikers-trying-to-take-over-the-beach complications. A beach girl flirts with one of them; later, she swims out to some island and becomes the first victim. Let this be a lesson to you: Do not flirt with bikers on the beach. Or maybe it should be do not star in beach movies featuring teenage characters if you are over 25 years old.

It’s not as strong a lesson as the "do not have sex" subtext from the Seventies slasher movies, but what the hell do you want for a buck twenty-five?

The utterly clueless cast members jerk around trying to figure out what’s going on for an interminable length of time – at least long enough for an entire slumber party’s worth of nubile young women to get dragged off into the big watery darkness--before the Bright Young Scientist’s housekeeper, Eulabelle ("It's the Voodoo!"), accidentally figures out how to kill them. Note that the Bright Young Scientist does not figure it out himself. He must have gotten his degree from the same box of Cracker Jacks as Dr. Susan McAlester.

And just how do you kill them? By spilling salt (sodium) on them, of course. Just like your average garden slug. Yep.

Now, I’m pretty much used to coping with logical inconsistencies in flicks like this, but there’s an enormous canyon you have to try to jump like Evel Kenieval to get on with this one. These are salt water critters, right? So how the hell is salt going to kill them?

It fair boggles the mind. And it looks really stupid, too. The special effects team went to great lengths to make the monster death scenes look like…nothing special.

A lot of people I talked to about this movie--real die-hard movieheads like myself--claimed that the print they watched was too dark, the video transfer terrible, the contrast so sharp that half the scenes were just vague smears of moving shadow. At least six people told me that.

See, I don’t think it was the video transfer. I think the movie was shot very dark on purpose, to hide the fact that it was so abysmal. I figure the filmmakers thought, "Hell, if they can’t see half the movie, maybe we can fool ‘em into thinking they’re watching something good!" You have to think, too, that they were probably angling for a drive-in release, where a good percentage of their target audience was not even facing the movie screen anyway.

So there you go. Imagine yourself in the back seat of your car, your hands roaming all over your high-school sweetheart, the music of the Del-Aires pouring in from that tinny little speaker next to your parking space … suddenly, it’s a good movie.

Then again, maybe not. Who the hell were the Del-Aires?

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(Dave Duggins is a regular contributor to HORROR-WOOD, and now has lots of his writings cached at his website.  Pay it a visit!  By the way, you'll be able to watch The Horror Of Party Beach "on the sand" at this year's Monster Bash.)

Thanks, Dave, for kicking sand on the 97-pound-weakling of a monster flick that is The Horror Of Party Beach.   Still, this isn't a bad party flick...as long as the liquor flows freely!

Article copyright Dave Duggins

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