The Beach Girls and the Monster (1965)

Just perfect...

Don't listen to the negative reviews

Admirable film.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Entertainingly bad. Black-and-white mid 60's film made to cash in on two popular genres at the time; monster movies and surfing flicks. The film opens with a passel of bathing beauties watusiing badly to the equally bad theme song, supposedly sung by Frank Sinatra Jr. No offense to the guy but he did not inherit his dad's talent. Anyway we proceed to the first killing on the beach of a bikini babe by a heavy-set googly-eyed, seaweed draped monster. No one sees the thing but the cops find suspicious footprints which they moulange and take to a local oceanographer who lives in a mansion overlooking the same beach. Said scientist, played by Jon Hall, is intolerant of the young surfers and their girls, believing the do not contribute anything to a decent society. His words. He wants his son to join him in the lab and live a fuddy-duddy life. His son prefers to live the surfer life with his future surfer's wife, a kewpie doll of a human being. Admittedly the surfers and their girls are a hard-to-take lot. You should hear some of the girls bragging on their boyfriends surfing prowess. Like they are the epitome of manhood. Things liven up when the oceanographer's tramp of a wife swishes into the scene. She has a thing going on with her stepson's best friend who is guest. Some way to pay his host back. To be fair to this idiot he seems to love the Mrs. When wifey not cuckholding her husband she make things worse by trying to vamp her stepson. Thankfully he can't stand her. With all this soap opera drama who needs a monster. Not to worry, the monster is still lurking around. At one point the whole surfer gang has a nightime hootenanny at the same beach where the killings occur. They even happily sing and dance to a simply dreadful song called "Monster in the Surf". Sheesh. The film is only about 70 minutes long but I believe there is a longer version available; scenes added to the TV version. I think I saw it a long time ago on television. Hopefully a complete version will be released on DVD soon. The Image Entertainment DVD is very good quality. Highly recommended to bad movie fans.

If you're not a fan of B-Movies then this film might look good to poke fun at, and it IS laughable, often cringe-worthy. The plot is easy to work out, the ending abrupt, it all REALLY seems to be about young girls dancing in bikinis in front of the camera, which incidentally, focuses on bottoms and boobs a LOT, all rather MTV, some things haven't changed! I didn't think the plot was the worst I've seen, not all the characters were two dimensional, the cheating 'fallen woman' and 'the cripple' (their term, not mine) were somewhat intriguing. The music changed to Sexy Vixen Mode every time said older adulterous woman (Sue Casey) sauntered by, I think she was the best thing in it.As a bit of an amateur film historian, I enjoyed it, the whole thing screams 1960s values, it has merit just for being a slice of film history.

If you are a fan of the bad movie cult favorite "The Horror of Party Beach" and wish there was more, then have I got a movie to recommend to you!! Just a year after this horrible horror film was released, "The Beach Girls and the Monster" debuted---showing that even terrible films can spur on copycat films. This time, instead of Del Tunney returning at the helm, this newer film was directed by none other than 1940s heart-throb, Jon Hall--who also stars in the movie as the grouchy doctor.This film is a lot like its predecessor. It's filled with LOTS of music and dancing on the beach as well as lots of young girls running about in bikinis. It differs, however, in the monster. Instead of the creature being the creation of nuclear radiation and hot dogs, this one turns out to be the crazy old doctor himself--as he HATES teenagers and beach music and wants it all to stop! Well, his motivation might go just a bit deeper....but not much. Throw into the mix his VERY trampy wife and Mark, a promising young research assistant , and you have a recipe for the good doc going nuts and running about in a rubber suit. It's all quite silly but perhaps just a bit better than its predecessor...but not by much. Both, however, are agreeable bad films--the sorts you can actually enjoy watching. Some things to look for in this one is the inconsistent acting and the crazy rear projection used in car chase scenes. Enjoyable AND stupid! different older style car at end

What "The Night of the Hunter" was for Charles Laughton--the sole directorial effort from a great film star--"The Beach Girls and the Monster" was for '40s matinée idol Jon Hall. But whereas Laughton's film is one of the eternal glories of the cinema, Hall's picture is...well, let's just say not nearly as glorious. In his film, Hall stars (at this point in his career, looking like Ernest Borgnine's older brother) as Dr. Otto Lindsay, an oceanographer whose troublesome son, rather than follow in his Pops' footsteps, prefers to go surfing with his pals and play his guitar at beach parties. This domestic friction is made even more problematic when a seaweed-draped, lumbering, rather ridiculous-looking monster starts to attack kids on the beach.... Anyway, Hall's film is silly in parts but not nearly as goofy as you might be expecting; certainly more serious than a Frankie & Annette movie! It has been well shot in B&W (although utilizes egregious rear projection for all driving sequences), showcases an annoyingly catchy theme song by Frank Sinatra, Jr., is decently acted, and features a twist ending of sorts that goes far in mitigating much of the silliness that has come before. Almost stealing the show is Sue Casey, playing Hall's trampy wife; my buddy Rob is quite right in pointing out that her sharp-tongued, shrewish vixen of a character would have been right at home in a '60s Russ Meyer flick. "Beach Girls," with a running time of only 66 minutes, still feels padded, with surfing stock footage, rock 'n' roll numbers accompanied by boogying bikini babes (played by the Watusi Dancing Girls from the Whiskey-A-Go-Go!), and assorted hijinks. Still, I can think of much less entertaining ways to spend an hour. As Michael Weldon succinctly puts it, in his spoiler review in "The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film": "A cheap laugh riot with lots of bongos, murders, and girls in bikinis."