Psychotronic Cinemavision: The Horror of Party Beach

Near a small east coast town, a truck dumps a drum full of radioactive waste into the ocean which breaks open spilling onto a human skeleton nearby.  The skeleton is transformed into an aquatic humanoid monster.  Tina (Marilyn Clarke) and her boyfriend Hank (John Scott), an assistant to a local scientist, are on their way to the beach when a motorcycle gang surrounds their car, but they escape.  Tina has been drinking, and Hank advises her not to drink as much, spurning a fight because Hank has grown out of that juvenile stage and is looking for something more adult and Tina still wants to have fun and party. As Hank commiserates with his boss’ daughter, Elaine (Alice Lyon), Tina dances with the other kids partying on the beach.  Eventually the motorcycle gang catches up and their leader Mike (Agustine Mayor), finding Tina attractive, begins dancing with her, which starts a fight between Hank and the clean-cut beach kids versus Mike and the greaser motorcycle gang.  Eventually this ends with no one being seriously hurt and Tina decides to swim out to the jetty where she is attacked and killed by the sea monster.  As the film progresses, more and more people, mostly females, are killed by what has now become a large group of monsters inexplicably having multiplied.  Eventually one of them gets injured on a piece of broken glass and Dr. Gavin, Hank’s boss, discovers that the creature’s muscle tissue is like sea anemone, a species of protozoa. The realize that most weapons won’t harm it and fear there is no way to kill it, when purely by accident metallic sodium is spilled on the tissue sample and causes it to burst into flames and die.  The police along with Elaine and her father begin searching the nearby bodies of water to discover the hiding place of the creatures, while Hank goes into New York city to get enough metallic sodium to destroy all the creatures.  Elaine, at a quarry, finds the hiding place and hurts her leg when the creatures begin to emerge.  Her father saves her but is badly injured in doing so.  Hank arrives just in time with the sodium and saves the day.

The Horror of Party Beach is a 1964 American horror film in the beach party subgenre.  It was directed by Del Tenney and was advertised as the “first horror monster musical”.  It premiered on June 1, 1964, and has made most critics “worst of” film lists. Even Stephen King called it “an abysmal little wet fart of a film”.  When director Del Tenney passed away, the Stamford Advocate wrote: “Connecticut had its own Ed Wood, an actor, director and entrepreneur named Del Tenney who made a series of truly awful pictures in the Stamford area during the 1960s, the most notorious of which is Horror of Party Beach, a 1964 drive-in quickie about an atomic mutation that terrorizes Stamford.”  But not all reviews were completely bad.  Michael Medved included the movie in his book The Fifty Worst Films of All Time and did call it the “The Worst Beach Movie Ever Made”, but also classified it as a “good bad movie” and  Filmink wrote “The film is violent and silly, with a decent number in ‘The Zombie Stomp’, and absolutely worth watching if you like your bad horror flicks, but not if you like beach party films.”

This is one of those films that is so bad it is actually kind of good and is somewhat fun to watch.  Mystery Science Theater 3000 showed the film during their eighth season.  Except for The Del-Aires, the real-life band that added the musical numbers, and Eulabelle Moore as Eulabelle, Dr. Gavin and Elain’s maid, a woman of color who thinks voodoo has something to do with the killings every aspect of this film is just awful.  The acting is stiff at times, feeling forced and unnatural with some characters being too melodramatic and others barely showing any emotion. Likewise, the script does not come from a place of truth with clumsy dialogue and awkward exposition.  The plot has more holes in it than Swiss cheese and the science barely explained making absolutely no sense.  The film is also supposed to be a nuclear warning film, but that message quickly gets lost and is hardly ever mentioned.  The costumes and makeup are laughable and although there is a bit more gore than one would expect from a film of this era, it will be tame to today’s audiences.  But all of this “terrible” comes together to make something “terribly fun” and I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed watching it and poking fun at it.  I guess I have to agree with critic Michael Medved and Film Link on this one!