LOW GRADE SCARES No. 1: The Beach Girls and the Monster
October is a month of horror. Clangoring has a annual tradition of watching some particular Z-grade flicks.
BeachTrampsloitation has a super limited film canon. It probably doesn’t even outside a small circle I’m familiar with. It’s beyond Teensploitation. It’s a niche of a niche of niche. There are a few on the fringes but there are probably only three that truly nail it right on.
Teenagers have a good ol’ time on a Malibu beach. Dancing, surfing, bongos, bonfires. The usual. Enter a monster. A very ridiculous, silly looking monster. The absurdity starts and ramps up as does the body count. Released in 1965, Beach Girls and the Party Monster unintentionally skewers two genres running out of gas around the time of its release. It makes an Ed Wood Jr production look like Scorsese. It’s inept, cheesy and accidentally brilliant because of it.
Frank Sinatra Jr gets a “music by” in the opening credits because he sings the film’s theme song. The rest is provided by the Hustlers, who provide some of the raunchiest and wettest reverb tanked and ramped up surf rock probably ever featured in a film up to that moment.
The mini-genre gets its name from the protagonist’s father, a science professor , griping about his kid wasting his time hanging out with a bunch of beach tramps. The father is played by Jon Hall who not only directed this goofy mess of a flick but also followed it up in ‘66 with another cross genre film called The Navy Vs the Night Monsters. I have never seen that movie but I have read that Roger Corman had some involvement in it but chose to stay uncredited and that Red and Sonny West of Elvis’ Memphis Mafia are in it. I’ll have to make a plan to watch it sometime if to only see if it is as equally ridiculous.