1965 beach/horror hybrid
Bad Movie Rating: 4/5 (Kristen: 4/5; Fred: 3/5; Libby: 2/5; Amy: 2/5)
Rating: 5/20
Plot: A guy in a monster costume is killing beach girls.
There are probably spoilers throughout this write-up, but I doubt it matters. You probably won’t watch this anyway. And why would I care about spoiling the movie when they couldn’t even finish coloring their poster up there?
Jon Hall, who also played that guy in the monster suit (c’mon, you would have totally had it figured out within the first fifteen minutes of this movie anyway, at least if you’ve seen even one episode of Scooby Doo), only directed this and something called The Navy vs. the Night Monsters which I’ve also heard is pretty terrible. He’s uncredited with that one though. So either somebody saw this and said, “We don’t want that Jon Hall guy’s name on our film,” or he was so embarrassed by The Navy vs. the Night Monsters that he didn’t want his name associated with it. I’m dying to know what the “Night Monsters” look like because the monster in this movie looked like this:
Of course, it is actually supposed to be a guy in a suit, so I guess I have to give them credit for creating a monster suit that actually looks like a monster suit. It does make you wonder if they filmed part of this as a straight monster story, decided that the monster wasn’t convincing enough, and then scrapped the original story for a more confusing one. Because seriously, there’s not even really any reason for the character to dress up as a monster in this. He kills surreptitiously anyway. There aren’t really witnesses. He also doesn’t really have a motive although he does call the beach girls tramps or something a few times. I guess he wants to rid his beaches of tramps, the exact obvious of what most warmblooded American men want.
The characters in this are interesting. Or they’re not interesting at all. I can’t really tell and don’t profess to be an expert on this sort of thing anyway. Hell, I just learned how to use paragraphs, so what do you expect from me. There are a bunch of teenagers played by people who are too old to play teenagers, and, during one scene at least, they seem like they’re in a completely different movie. They’re doing what teenagers in the 1960’s probably did on the beach–dance, wear glasses with springy eyeballs, play with a puppet that looks like a discarded prop from a Showbiz Pizza, play the bongos. The monster eventually comes [sorry–another spoiler], but it’s not until you’ve forgotten what movie you’re even watching.
The best character is a guy with a limp who sort of creeps around, walks around seemingly for a couple days and nights, sculpts poorly and creepily, and then eventually becomes the guy accused of these heinous crimes. It’s obvious that he’s not involved, especially since we see him see and actually brawl with the monster, but it almost feels like the audience is supposed to thing he’s involved in all this anyway. It’s very confusing. There’s also a whorish step-mother played by Sue Casey who in one scene is supposed to be drunk. The camera seems obsessed with her legs in that extended scene that did not, for any reason, need to be extended. Sue Casey, by the way, played Sale House Woman #2 in American Beauty, so she has that going for her. Jon Hall isn’t a bad actor, but he’s playing a fish expert who seems to think fish have both claws and lungs. He’s a better actor than he is a writer or a student of science, I guess.
My favorite thing about this movie, as well as the thing that bumps it up a point to put it in above-average good-bad movie territory, is the fake driving sequences. There’s a lot of normal, everyday driving and one long chase sequence at the end, and the shots outside the car are dizzying and don’t make sense at all. At times, it seems like the cars are speeding in these dangerous circles, and at other times, it seems like they’re simultaneously approaching and moving away from the same fence. It’s like Jon Hall said, “I know we could just keep this simple, but I want to give the audience vertigo with this chase scene! I want them to feel like they’re in the car!” It’s really pretty funny.
Oh, and Frank Sinatra is credited for the music in this. He co-wrote one song used in this thing but does not actually perform the song. I guess that’s close enough.
What do you think of these paragraphs? Be honest.
