Wild on the Beach

Frankie Randall (who?) and Sherry Jackson try a mean imitation of Frankie Avalon and Annette in this dreary,black and white rip-off of the beach party flicks.There's too much plot,(something about sharing a beach house,disliking each other,rousing the ire of the local college board,until the happy ending.) Frankie sings alot (songs you'll never hear again),Sherry Jackson does a nice Annette pout but it's all for naught.Sonny and Cher and the Astronauts do a brief guest bit,there's some lame comic turns (one guy is always losing his contacts,etc.),stuffy adult reactions to the kids,no beach scenes,no babes in bikinis,just alot of plot.Even boys and girls forced to share the same house isn't presented in a spicy way.Everyone is too hostile.I saw this picture when it first came out and thought it was great but I grew up!

OMG! haha. There are no words to adequately describe how really bad this movie is. I gave it a 3 rating only because it's so much darned fun to goof on. The acting is third rate; the story is second rate; and everything else goes downhill from there. Even the dancers who are supposedly dancing the Frug, the Swim, and other 1965 period dancers are bad.

The oddest element is the incidental music played while people are talking. It's impossible to describe! I guess it was meant to be funny — a la Ozzie & Harriet, perhaps, but it's just so bad and has no real connection to the scenes in which it is played.

Sonny & Cher's performance is typical, but the song, "It's Gonna Rain Outside" is laughable.

This would have been perfect for the old 80s show MST3000, which goofed on bottom-budget movies like this. These days it's probably best for stoners who may or may not recall 1965.

If you ever needed proof of the superiority of AIP's Beach Party series, here it is. Lippert couldn't even bring themselves to shoot this in colour, and they certainly couldn't afford stars of the magnitude of Frankie and Annette. The only saving grace of this tiresome take on teenage life in the mid 60s is, not surprisingly, the music. Sonny and Cher appear performing It's Gonna Rain, a garagey b-side that belies their pop leanings. The Astronauts are on hand performing a sub-Elvis number and the film's highlight, Here Comes Speedy Gonzales, and Sandy Nelson pounds out a little teen beat while a rather tuneless (and nameless) band backs him up.

Way outdated plot (old-timers don't like the idea of boys and girls living together in the same house), brainless script, terrible songs that the producers apparently thought "the kids" would think was cool but definitely weren't, a bland leading man whose singing and acting are on the same level (lousy), chintzy production values (to be expected from a Lippert picture) and some of the unfunniest "comedy" bits (consisting mainly of old people tripping and falling down) in recent memory all combine to make this cheap "Beach Party" ripoff barely watchable. At least the "Beach Party" movies were shot in color so the audience would see nice shots of the beach and the ocean; this thing is shot in black-and-white, so the few scenes where you actually see the beach are bland and uninteresting.

Just about the only things this mess has going for it are Sherry Jackson, who was adorable as a child actress and grew up to be an absolute knockout; and a couple of shots of some cute girls running around a beach house in their nighties. That's it. Period.

Don't waste your time.

Yes, Sonny and Cher are in it. They perform one number, but do not engage in any comedy. Speaking of comedy, what passes as humor in this film is unfunny and depressing. Justin Smith, a character actor who mostly worked in TV, gets saddled with unfunny comedy material. Making it even more horrible is the worst background music ever used for a film. It is absolutely unlistenable. The credit (?) for the score goes to Jimmie Haskell, who wrote and orchestrated for movies, TV, and albums. I hope for Mr. Haskell's sake that this job was farmed out to a ghost writer. And then there's Frankie Randall. Randall is a fine jazz pianist who made a few albums in the 1960s and was championed by Frank Sinatra. Later he became a regular attraction and entertainment director in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. He still performs and records today. As tasty as his piano and vocal stylings are, he always seems to be a bit under pitch. This problem is evident in this film and is accentuated by pop musical material which is foreign to Randall's style. He also seems a bit uncomfortable as an actor. I guess Lippert saw him as an alternative to Frankie Avalon, but Avalon is adept at comedy and can make poor pop songs sound like Cole Porter. Randall is only effective when interpreting the REAL Cole Porter songs.