Hey. Let's be honest: How can you NOT like a beach party movie from the mid-'60s? Nobody expects "Last Summer at Marienbad"... It's going to be free and breezy, some forgettable songs, more-forgettable comedy, and comely girls DARING to wear bikinis in a long-ago age when young American females were expected to be more abdominally modest in their attire. "Surf Party" is interesting on a couple of levels. It's one of the first rip-offs of the Frankie/Annette AIP beach-blanket bonanzas; those films, directed by William Asher, had just kicked off the previous year (1963) after Hollywood long toyed with the beach-party genre in romps like "Gidget", "Where the Boys Are" and the wonderfully obscure "Love in a Goldfish Bowl" from 1961. Somehow, though, none of the studios pulled the trigger before American International Pictures released "Beach Party" and thereby established what instantly became a turgidly static formula: Girl and boy meet on the sand, frolic without sex, break up and get back together, through it all sporadically grooving to some c-grade musical acts. (Many of these films relied, unfortunately, on hastily assembled side-men "groups" playing awful, tin-pan-alley stuff.) This one avoids that grating pitfall with legitimate musical talent on hand, although Jackie DeShannon's intractable acting style all-but negates her singing performances.
"Surf Party" is standard fare in that it's a movie aimed at young people but evidently made by middle-aged guys who know little about '60s youth. There's a smirky, bemused treatment of teen-age interests, serving only to freeze the movie in awkward, uninformed detachment - like a birthday-party performer trying to entertain kids by showing them the elements of algebra.
But this is different: "Surf Party" is in black and white - in fact, it may just be the only beach party movie not in Sea-and-Ski color. Worth a look, if only because its probable pre-Kennedy assassination (even pre-Beatles) filming gives it a lost-innocence appeal missing even from later Pepsi-Generation navel bombardments. Bobby Vinton is... well... Bobby Vinton. However, Patricia Morrow is quite watchable, and brings more acting "heft" than these movies generally demand.
Here's a double bill, in case you're sitting around without a life: Pair up "Surf Party" with "Catalina Caper", the late-1967 swan song of the surfin' safari flicks.
