Operation Bikini (1963)

Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

Excellent adaptation.

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Before Frankie Avalon was dealing with the kind of bikinis one sees on the beach in those Beach Party films, his agent got him to this turkey of a film where before the Bikini atoll was a site for the atomic bomb testing it was a small contested bit of real estate in the Pacific War.Tab Hunter leads a squad of marines including Avalon with Jim Backus as a gunnery sergeant on Captain Scott Brady's submarine on a mission. Said mission is to find a sunken American submarine near Bikini Atoll and blow it up before the Japanese take it and find that newfangled sonar it has.Among the perks are some lovely Polynesian beauties that some of the men indulge. Avalon does not, instead he has these silly out of place dream sequences where we get a couple of songs.It all gets done after a fashion. Operation Bikini was made on the cheap in black and white, the better to take advantage of some real Pacific combat footage.One really silly excuse for a war film.

As if the really fake submarine deck scenes and awful dialog wasn't bad enough, we then have to contend with the Eva Six character falling in love with Tab Hunter, right after he HITS HER. I guess that's what defined male/female relationships in 60's cinema. "Beat me up and I will immediately fall for you." Thankfully, she dies before the end of the movie, so we don't have to imagine them going back to the States to continue this ugliness as a married couple.Jim Backus looked so bad in this movie that I had to infer that he was preparing for his role in "Gilligan's Island." His delivery was stilted, slow and terrible - as though he had to be prompted from off-camera before each line. The whole production must have consisted of scenes wrapped after the first take.

I agree pretty much with what everyone else wrote, so I won't reiterate the confusion, sadness and astonishment this movie subjected me to but I'm certainly relieved that other people seem to share my impression of the movie.But I am curious if anyone else agrees with me that the voice-over narration at the end (while the girls in bikinis are prancing around) sounds like a young William Shatner?Another thing that has me a little confused is why the Underwater Demolition Team ("UDT") that Tab Hunter's character was in charge of was a USMC unit, as opposed to a Navy UDT (precursor to SEALs, which didn't come around until the 1960s).

Someone once wrote a fascinating essay on the subject of abject incompetence as unintentional surrealism, and anyone intrigued enough to want to see proof of that need look no further than Operation Bikini, a film that's so woefully awful it just may be the work of a genius none of us can understand and the world won't fully appreciate for decades. The film's stars are Frankie Avalon and Eva Six, who that same year made a film called Beach Party, and a number of teenagers went to see this low-budget WWII 'action' flick thinking that they were heading for surf city. Surprised there were no riots in the theatre. Though the film is in black and white, whenever Frankie, aboard a Naval ship heading to bikini atoll for an attack, dreams about his girl back home (why isn't she played by Annette?), the image is suddenly in color. He's tempted away from virginal purity by an island girl, but she's a California blonde! There's no reason why his character would sing (except that the non-singing character is played by a singer), but then again, Frankie broke into song in the middle of The Alamo, a far more prestigious picture, so why not here? There's another color sequence at the end, by the way, in which two California girls stroll along the beach in bikinis - which has nothing to do with the film other than the bathing suit was named after the atoll. All the big shooting scenes, on the sea and on land, are stock footage, and the black and white of them doesn't match with the film itself. Tab Hunter is the rugged (?!) commander who falls in love with the island girl they DO meet, Hungarian born Eva Six. She bites his hand, makes love to him at night, then dies (while nude, though you can't see anything) at the hands of Japanese soldiers who would rather machine gun her and three other lovelies than defend themselves from attacking Americans. This is either the most awful WWII movie ever made or some experimental form of avant garde cinema that, to date, no one has yet 'gotten.'Richard Bakalyan