It’s stupid; genuinely, refreshingly stupid. And it’s badly made; genuinely, refreshingly badly made. The movie isn’t intellectually developed enough to develop concepts like irony, and that is sort of a godsend. Earlier, I talked about the girl who said that Spaceballs was the greatest movie ever made. And that she hates the “artsy-fartsy” crap. Post-modernism seemed to kill philosophical thinking. It was the last big movement. Post-modernism makes every communication equally meaningful and thus I suppose equally meaningless. A civilization, a religion, and an aesthetic founded on Spaceballs would be one that is constantly consuming itself. It’s post-humanism and post-theism; they’ve evolved artistically beyond human beings and gods, apparently comfortable with the idea that there is nothing in life to experience. I loathed this girl with every fiber of my being. I loathed what she said implicitly and explicitly about the future for our art. And even more, I loathed the fact that it was impossible to have any kind of conversation with her. The Spaceballs generation also worships the sitcom; every statement they make is a laugh line. Even in seeing movies like Spaceballs to be little more than a release valve, and not as a substitute for real movies, I never really liked Spaceballs. It’s funnier and more enjoyable than History of the World: Part I, but like History of the World: Part I there is something cruel about the vulgarity. Brooks doesn’t seem to be making a comment about the cruelty or vulgarity (or his self-hating Jewishness, {“I’m the only Jew who ever made a buck offa Hitler”}), he seems to be reveling in it. He won’t even resort to graphic violence or sex for laughs; his movies never go over the top, they are content with wallowing in the sewer. Brooks strikes me as the kind of guy who tears wings off butterflies. There isn’t anything but bitterness in these movies. Beach Blanket Bingo has thankfully not evolved to that level yet. It’s just utterly stupid; it invites your derision with a toothy smile, more than happy to play the clown. It often seemed to me that the Spaceballs fan was developing a psychological defense against real art that may actually affect her. There is something defensiveness about the Spaceballs philosophy, like it believes that it is beyond criticism. If it fails to make you laugh, at least it isn’t uncool or unhip. Beach Blanket Bingo is hardly great art or a challenging movie (not that I didn’t believe that the picture could be capable), but that stupidity, that primitiveness, that vulnerability to derision makes it a purer one. Again, as it’s not art I wouldn’t necessarily endorse a civilization that values Beach Blanket Bingo; but I at least feel that we have somewhere to go with this.

The “Frankie and Annette” beach blanket movies were a precursor to the horny teenager and slasher movies of the 1980s. Without Frankie and Annette we probably wouldn’t have Where the Boys Are ‘84, Summer Lovers or Friday the 13th. Even at their lightest, the filmmakers of the horny teenager pictures of the '80s stepped away from them a little. They were cold enough, detached enough, that you could see them as simply being a product of the 1980s, for better or for worse. The direction was more or less point, click and shoot; and that worked. We were being immersed into an amoral, uncaring, unformed universe. The '80s directors were so damn lazy they were plainly existential. There were considerably more artistic freedoms in the 1980s as far as portrayal of teenage sexuality goes, and so the iciness helped to counterbalance the onslaught of the slime. As Beach Blanket Bingo is more or less utterly harmless it doesn’t need this cold quality and it’s free to simply be playful.

I don’t really have any reason to believe that this film in itself influenced any of the films of the Nouvelle Vague, or vice versa. The bikini movies were produced and distributed by American International Pictures, Roger Corman’s joint, so I wouldn’t be surprised regardless. The picture shares some of the French New Wave’s heat though; it’s got gags like the back projection, the abrupt breaking of the fourth wall, overt movie references in the dialogue, mid-air freeze frames. Most curious are the musical numbers. They are mostly mediocre; there is only song that is really worth a squirt of warm piss: “He’s My New Love” which is sung by newcomer Linda Evans. It’s worth a couple of squirts actually; it’s a damn fine song. Just when the film was lagging a bit, we get this double shot of espresso and we’re giddy. The songs appear to have been recorded on a soundstage earlier and then lip-synched to during filming. I have a fetish for lip-synching in movies, much like I have a fetish for Super 8 home movies in movies. Dennis Potter exploited this in for Pennies from Heaven: in the feature film it was played for its artificiality, it was an anti-musical; in the mini-series, so I have I surmised from what I read, it was played as pure desperation. (The difference between the miniseries and the feature film seems to be that the miniseries felt affection for its characters. In the feature film it’s all loathing). In Beach Blanket Bingo there doesn’t seem to be any thought or meaning behind the effect, it’s all snap, crackle and pop. The movie, in other words, provides the seeds of post-modern cinema without really becoming wholly post-modern. At this stage, it’s basically just having fun teasing the rules, tiptoeing into cinematic anarchy. None of the songs correspond with well-choreographed dance numbers, but a few correspond with badly choreographed dance numbers. Just as the songs have a sole exception, so does the blocking. I really liked Donna Loren’s “It Only Hurts When I Cry,” which is sung in the kids’ dormitory. The director, William Asher, uses a staircase to divide the frame diagonally; Loren is underneath and a teenage boy strumming a guitar is on top. It looks like a split screen, but it’s not. Very film school, but very neat. For the most part the songs are only interesting in the fact that they are songs. The very idea that Beach Blanket Bingo is a musical is attractive, but you could say that about any of the gimmicks. Asher is a terrible director and a terrible screenwriter (he cowrote the picture with Leo Townsend). His other non-beach movie credits include direction for the TV series versions of Harper Valley P.T.A., Private Benjamin and The Bad News Bears. He also did the made-for-TV reunion films Return to Green Acres and I Dream of Jeannie: 15 Years Later. I am not making this up.

Not a lot of work seems to have been put into Beach Blanket Bingo. It looks like it’s been made on the run; they haven’t spent any time really grooming the visual look or the dialogue. The wisecracks are lame, very lame, and they just keep them coming, walking a fine line between gleefully silly stupidity and genuinely testing the patience of the audience. As for the look, well, Asher seems to have forgotten about it completely focusing only on making sure the actors are getting the job done. As far as he is concerned, as long as the camera is in focus, is running and we see everybody in the frame, his job is done. There isn’t a whole lot of specific stuff in Beach Blanket Bingo that is very good; rather, Asher is surfing on a bikini beach philosophy and concept. I actually had fairly high expectations for Beach Blanket Bingo. I had told people before I watched the film that I had hoped they didn’t try to be too self-congratulatory and too hip and ironic and they would just let the anarchy rein free. Well, they did, but the film still doesn’t quite work as well as it should. They have the right attitude, but not the right amount of momentum. The picture doesn’t have enough oomph. I was actually a little disappointed; I kept wishing that the film was just a little smarter and that they just put a little more love into it.

There are some problems that really could never have been fixed; they seem to be too embedded into the structure. Frankie Avalon is a bad lead. He’s a likable enough kid, but he just isn’t substantial enough to hold up a picture. It’s impossible to really identify with him in any capacity. It’s possible you’ll like the villains more; the anti-establishment always gets more of my sympathies. The leader of the villainous “Rat Pack” is Eric Von Zipper (Harvey Lembeck), a bumbling 42-year-old Brooklyn Jew that idolizes Adolf Hitler. I’m not making this up; he has a framed picture in his hideout. He also adores the blonde Linda Evans character, Sugar Kane. Harvey Lembeck is certainly a tad more annoying than Avalon, but he’s so harmless that it’s hard not to rue him. Frankie and Sugar Kane’s manager Bullets, played by Paul Lynde (I swear to God I’m not making this stuff up), lay it on a little thick with the wisecracks when Von Zipper and his gang crash one of Kane’s parties. We don’t like Von Zipper quite enough for it to be unpleasant, but it’s certainly forced. They need to work overtime to remind us that Von Zipper is the villain; they want to alienate him from the real heroes. Von Zipper breaks into Sugar Kane’s room. She apparently thinks that it’s one of Bullets publicity stunts, and I think kind of likes Von Zipper. (Sugar Kane is sexier in her nightgown than she or any of the other girls could hope to be in their bikinis). Von Zipper doesn’t rape her of course, he teaches her how to play pool and she soaks in his puppy dog devotion with a smile. Then Von Zipper’s friend South Dakota Slim kidnaps Kane from him and carries her off to “the old saw mill” where he hopes to but her in half. Why? According to both Von Zipper and Slim he’s paying homage to his favorite movie The Perils of Pauline. Again, not making it up.

Needless to say, Kane doesn’t like being in Slim’s possession. South Dakota Slim provides the movie with a real villain, in contrast to the false one of Von Zipper. There is a strange scene where two of Von Zipper’s cronies, Puss and Boots, opine that they’re bad but they’re not that bad. That scene probably wouldn’t have been in the movie if we weren’t meant to feel that Puss and Boots, and by extension Von Zipper, were really good guys at heart. South Dakota Slim is played by the cult actor Timothy Carey. When I heard that Carey played one of the villainous bikers in the picture my ears perked up and got ready for something really terrific. It seemed like the filmmakers would know that they were doing something really potentially subversive. Uh, not really. Part of the Carey mythology is that he is really difficult to work with. Relating the story of Reservoir Dogs, Quentin Tarantino said that the part of Joe was between Timothy Carey and Lawrence Tierney. He chose Tierney because he heard that Carey was a nightmare to work with, but there is no way that he could have been as hard to work with as Tierney. As Carey told the story, he was passed up because Harvey Keitel refused to work with him and Keitel had a provision in his contract that he could make such demands. Carey said basically the same thing about Kirk Douglas and Stanley Kubrick. Carey was well-liked by Kubrick and had memorable parts in The Killing and Paths of Glory, but Douglass loathed him and as he was the producer of Spartacus he wouldn’t let Kubrick use him in the picture. That ended their professional and personal relationship. So what’s the deal with Carey, what makes him so difficult to work with? I think it’s that he’s very self-absorbed. When he acts a scene, he acts the fuck out of it. He’s also a real practical joker; and he doesn’t give a shit about fitting in with everybody else. This is his trip, not yours. The reason that Douglas hated him was because he was stealing Paths of Glory from him. Compare with Tierney, who is difficult in a more traditional sense: he’s just a mean, drunk, crotchety old bastard. Playing the what-if game can drive you to the brink of insanity, but it’s sort of irresistible to wonder about the potential of Timothy Carey’s Joe.

Carey is terrible in Beach Blanket Bingo, but he hijacks the movie all the same. His performance in the picture bears semblance to his contemporaries Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean and Nicholas Cage in Peggy Sue Got Married, only it’s not as nuanced or thorough. Unlike Pirates of the Caribbean or Peggy Sue Got Married there is nothing solid (and thus, on the flip side, anything dull or pedestrian) about Beach Blanket Bingo. Carey is unable to exert his energy pushing against anything. There is nothing to upstage. And the part is too small and ultimately inconsequential for Carey to really explode either. His every movement and every reading are too labored; he tries to work his short appearance too much. It seems like he’s condescending to material that is beyond condescension. In the first scene where we see him, South Dakota Slim is playing pool with Eric Von Zipper but Von Zipper is taking too long to make his shot. “Are we gonna be playing pool anytime, boobie,” Carey asks while resting on his elbow, his voice getting just slightly angrier near the end. He’s painfully unfunny, the only thing that he really contributes to the film, and it’s not as small a contribution as it may sound, is the fact that he’s Timothy Carey. The simple fact of his being reinforces Beach Blanket Bingo’s origins as drive-in exploitation. (Apparently, Carey worked in a bit from his 1957 film Poor White Trash. Conceivably, without the filmmakers knowing what he was doing).

Beach Blanket Bingo has a fetish for guest stars. In addition to Timothy Carey and Paul Lynde (also at his Lyndest), the film has Don Rickles and Buster Keaton. Rickles gets to do a bit of his routine where he lobs some insults at Frankie and Annette and they just giggle at him. It more or less comes out of nowhere and is grossly out of character (he plays the owner of a skydiving business), but I guess they just figured that since they have Don Rickles they might as well use him. What am I complaining about, like I expected or wanted a film where Don Rickles stays in character. Buster Keaton also gets some top billing. He’s been made into a sex-crazed Pan who rarely talks but is not beyond chasing the bikini-clad babes. Most viewers of Beach Blanket Bingo consider this to be one of his low-points, but that seems to me to be a bit of a mistake. A quick look on his bio shows that the low point of his career was actually in the 1930s. By then he was washed up, and actually became incredibly depressed and an alcoholic. In 1940, he married Eleanor Norris and that brought him back from the brink. He died in 1966, peacefully in his sleep, after playing cards with her. It’s a tremendously romantic story. But anyway; Keaton didn’t direct a good deal later in his life, but his films were very well respected in the '50s and then in the '60s. He won a lifetime achievement Oscar in 1959. His post-bikini beach movie work included a short film scripted by Samuel Beckett called Film and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum with Zero Mostel. Some of his later work was made in order to cash a paycheck, I’m sure, and he never rose back to the prominence that he had at his zenith. But he was hardly at Bela Lugosi depths at this point. His presence in the film, much like his presence in a lot of his later films, seems to wish to celebrate his legend more than exploit it. The celebrity cameos are every bit the gimmick as the freeze frames and the lip-synching, and like all the gimmicks I sort of wished that there was just a little more oomph to them.

Beach Blanket Bingo’s storyline is a gimmick also. Sugar Kane comes to the beach, and Annette gets jealous that Frankie is paying her attention. A redhead skydiving instructor also seems to be trying to put the moves on him. This seems to be the same plot of every last one of the beach movies, and of course Frankie would never leave Annette for any of the other bimbos and so it’s really not much of a storyline. The subplot involves their buddy “Bonehead” falling in love with a real mermaid. She tells him that it can never really be, and so at the end of the picture Bonehead hooks up with Sugar Kane instead. The movie is basically saying that you shouldn’t try and chase sexy blonde mermaids and should come down to earth instead and try and chase sexy blonde teenage pop idols. It’s a twist on the romantic comedy cliché where the hero is turned off by the glossy sex goddess and falls in love instead with the mousy down-to-earth girl who has a personality and character to match his own. Here, the hero gets the babe of his dreams either way. Yeah, the storyline doesn’t have the right amount of oomph either. It’s blatantly superficial and arbitrary, but they still sell it a little too hard. Once you put mermaids in your picture, you should be free to be a little goofier than this.

Strangely enough, from what I have seen of it (talking about movies that I haven’t seen all the way through is tricky business), 1987’s Back to the Beach may very well be the ultimate bikini beach movie. If you were to combine '80s vulgarity with the playfulness of Beach Blanket Bingo, you would, in fact get something a lot like Mel Brooks’ Spaceballs and History of the World: Part I. The only thing that Back to the Beach really seems to import from '80s filmmaking is resources. There are a number of factors that play into this, but in 1987 it doesn’t seem like you could really make movies as cheap as they made Beach Blanket Bingo. As far as content, the picture looks just as harmless however. Back to the Beach has a sarcastic narration by the now middle-aged Frankie and Annette’s son Bobby. Bobby’s a leather-wearing punker, and the narrator the film announces that he is the one for us to relate to. The film isn’t really a spoof, but the sarcasm injects the picture with some kind of intelligence and humanity that we can’t get when your film is being carried by Ken Doll Frankie Avalon. Still, Frankie and Annette are basically still Frankie and Annette; the movie is smart but it’s not too smart to betray its origins. That cast of celebrity cameos looks good too. Buster Keaton, Paul Lynde, and Don Rickles are replaced by Pee-Wee Herman, O.J. Simpson, Jerry Mathers, Alan Hale and Bob Denver. Back to the Beach doesn’t try to raise above crap by being conscious of the fact that it is crap, it sets out from the beginning to always be merely crap. It looks like it’s a beach movie through and through; manufactured by its very design to be '80s nostalgia of '60s nostalgia.

I’m not sure that I’ll do the Halloween series after I finish the Nightmare on Elm Street series; I’m planning on reviewing something that doesn’t belong to a franchise, but Beach Blanket Bingo and the potential of Back to the Beach suggest a tantalizing “what if” scenario. It all more or less looks like variations of the same movie, structured and formulaic but with the potential to be an otherwise anarchic wet dream of a cinematic experience. And with that comes the suggestion that the approach to the subject will eventually be refined to the point of perfection.