The Beach Girls and the Monster (1965)

Very well executed

Instant Favorite.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

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.

Someone or something murders a babe at the beach, but the babes keep coming back to shake their booties to music of some sort coming from somewhere. This is the only film I know where the babes shake booties while sitting down. That seems remarkable. The beach babes wear conservative bikinis. The older babes in the bedrooms or is it boudoirs wear clothing taken from old Sears catalogs. The beach girl dancers are from the Whiskey-a-Go-Go. They do know how to shake what needed shaking in the fashion of the time.Jon Hall acted, directed, and supervised the cinematography. The cinematography looks good. Actors playing adolescents look much older, but then maybe the characters are not teenagers. Somehow this is not as bad a film as it seems—it is not pretentious like "The Graduate" and not exactly a cliché the way many American International films were. It is not even silly like "The Last Time I Saw Archie." The near final scene where a woman walks into the beach house almost works. The trailer is good, except for the shadow of the mike.

Beach set horror film about a monster stalking and killing kids in around the coast.Its an okay (at best) little film with lots of music, a rather dumb, but fun looking monster and just a touch of mystery. In all honesty the best way to view this film is as the model for every Scooby Doo episode ever made. I know I just ruined this for about six of you but for the rest of you I probably just saved you from wasting 65 minutes of your life. It's a film that is just as clever as Scooby. Beyond that the film really doesn't have much to recommend it. If you're in the mood for a the live action Scooby Doo film (sans the dog) give this a shot otherwise take a pass.

... when you see a boom mike in the trailer!"The Beach Girls and the Monster" features a clear shot of Sue Casey speaking on the phone during the trailer. With a boom mike above her. And the perch.The movie itself has a delightful scraping the barrel approach when it comes to exploitation. You can find the two main sub-genres from the 60's b-movies melting: the monster movie and the beach movie. Both aspects are indeed badly done. The monster is everything but frightening and one has to wonder why any of his victims hadn't the idea to kick him between the legs. And the beach part is so cliché ridden it looks like a "Lord Loves A Duck" sequence, except for the fact that "Lord Loves A Duck" was a parody (also featuring boom mikes on screen). There's for instance, for comic relief, a ventriloquist and his lion Kingsley who duets with the girls on a corny song. Actually, he could be the worst ventriloquist on Earth: he carries a false beard to hide his moving lips.Then, you find all the features of cheap exploitation movies. Washed-out actors playing the parts of supposedly attractive characters. "Teenagers" that were last seen in high school 15 before the shooting. Big names on the credits, like Frank Sinatra. Even if you must add "Jr" as that's his son, Frank Jr, and he merely wrote the score (mostly lounge jazz and a few Beach Boys attempts). Actually, Mark (Walter Edmiston) looks a little like Sinatra as the sculptor that Sue Casey teases. (By the way, his sculptures are not exactly flattering even for a fading beauty like Ms Casey.)Jon Hall, for his only directing credit, shot the thing cheaply and quickly. His house was a convenient place for inner shots and he tends to use zooming extensively to end a scene without making another shot. It's irritating even when it's Luchino Visconti who's directing and Jon Hall is apparently no Visconti.And there's the story, or indeed the lack of story. You also know that a movie has got a problem when Robert Silliphant is credited for "additional dialogue". Silliphant took a writing hand in both "The Creeping Terror" and "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?". In other words, he's responsible for two of the lamest screenplays of all times! "The Beach Girls and the Monster" is his third and final screen credit. So I have to wonder how much Silliphant improved the original screenplay.On the plus side, the girls on the beach (actually the dancing troupe from the Whisky-A-Go- Go club) have tight bikinis and giggles as if they were Shakira's mother. Or grandmother. So, every movie has a redeeming quality.