Operation Bikini (1963)

Let's be realistic.

brilliant actors, brilliant editing

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

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

Out of mild curiosity and boredom, I just watched OPERATION BIKINI. I'm still trying to get my brain back to semi-rational thought after seeing this train wreck. All I can think is-- the producers had a bunch of stock WW2 footage and a few rooms of a borrowed submarine set. Then they threw in a bunch of folks they had under contract. What the heck is Jim Backus doing in this thing????? The man was already a well-known character actor, from tragic roles like the father in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE to the voice of MISTER MAGOO. For no apparent reason he's a member of the UDT team that also has Tab Hunter and Franky Avalon; I'm guessing he's the naval equivalent of a sergeant, as Hunter's character is in charge but Backus seems to be the one who runs the squad. That is, when he actually has any lines. Mostly he just stands there. In fact, much of the cast just stands there. It's like the producers only had a budget for a very limited amount of dialogue and figured that if the actors simply stood there and filled the frame, that would count as acting. Scott Brady had never been a major player but, like Backus, he seems to have come in for a few days work and a paycheck. Gary Crosby was trying to make a go of it, playing off his derelict father's name and the family resemblance. Like Backus, he also mostly stands there.Oh, man.... this film is just so very wrong in so many ways..... It's like a bunch of students trying to perform a high school production of UP PERISCOPE and then they decide to rewrite the second act!And worst of all, the producers destroyed what little merit the film might have had. As it looked on paper, the film would have been a modest sub adventure, suitable for a double bill. But then they added Frankie Avalon and decided to give him musical numbers! AND THEY WERE IN COLOR!!!!!! The rest of the movie is in black and white and all of a sudden along comes this bizarre COLOR musical interlude?!?!?!?!?!? And 20 minutes later, HERE IT COMES AGAIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!Frankie Avalon also had a gratuitous musical number in his other 1963 sub adventure, VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA, but at least there it made sense!Oh, and for a final totally unrelated finale, the film ends with COLOR footage of two 1963 starlets in bikinis playing on a beach while the credits roll. Looking at that made me realize how little the producers thought of the film. OPERATION BIKINI is not a good film-- hell, it's barely adequate!-- but the color sequences show a mindset of cynical desperation or Ed-Wood-level incompetence.