Beach Party Rating: Release Date: 18 December, 2001 Retail Price: $14.95 Sorry, this product is not currently available. Cast: John Payne Annette Funicello Frankie Avalon Robert Cummings Complete Cast (9 total)

Beach Party Reviews

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And Wild Man Dick Dale
Funny how when this series started it must have been aimed at adults as well as teens, for the central love story is the one between The Professor and Mary Anne--no, not the ones from Gilligans Island, though it's an odd coincidence isn't it--but the adult anthrolopogists played by Robert Cummings and Dorothy Malone. For an Oscar winner, Malone doesn't have much to do here, but when she's prowling around the Professor's apartment alone, manning his directional signals and playing a 45 on his hifi, she goes absently sexy, swinging her hips to the music, singing along to Annette's prerecorded vocal to "Promise Me Anything, Give Me Love." Some sophisticated sound editing in this sequence produces the effect that Malone is sometimes singing on the record, her voice noticeably less processed and more "musical" than Annette's super-produced studio squeak (that we all love anyhow). I will say that neither Malone nor Annette is very well served by the makeup department, who must have shot their wad trying to make Eva Six look exactly like Marilyn Monroe in the first reel of LET'S MAKE LOVE. But poor Annette with that crazy hairdo that looks as though she'd slept all night under an anvil, while Dorothy Malone looks like her skin is the shiny pink of a china pig.

Anyhow the plot is all about the Professor trying to get tenure and finish his book about the sex lives of the surfing youth. It's pretty funny and most of the ironically dimwitted scholarly comments about the "tribe" of the surfers seem right on today. He takes Annette as his protege, but she mistakes his interest in her tribe for a personal interest, and to make Frankie jealous she reciprocates by "dating" him even though he must be twice her age or more. It's a little eerie, and Dorothy Malone calls it "Lolita love," which isn't far from the truth.

Valera Noland, as Annette's best friend Rhonda, gives her usual animated performance. Whatever happened to her? But most of all, who is the dancer (not Candy Johnson) who wears her hair tied back with a headband and a tight sweater with big green stripes who dances around Frankie during the "Don't Stop Now" number--the one who stares him down with a seductive smirk at every turn? She resembles a really, really sexy version of Jane Fonda and her dancing could make a dead man stand up straight for once. Don't you think it strange how, in the Beach Party movies, Jody McCrea plays the southern goofus "Deadhead," okay, he doesn't play him well, but to me he IS Deadhead, and then when AIP decided to make "Sergeant Deadhead," Jody must have figured this was his big break, only to discover that this time out, Frankie was playing Deadhead? What a bitter blow to the most nibble-able torso in the movies of the 1960s!

beach party
these is also a great movie, my whole family likes the beach party movies

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