The four Beach Party movies are as wholesome as a tin of apple pie, though not quite as daring. A series of stories about two college-aged kids named Frankie and Dee-Dee (short for Dolores) who live In a magical Southern California bubble filled with beauty, surf, sun and love and whose romantic, surf-filled summers fall apart at the manipulations of others and the interjections of the cruel world around them, the Beach Party movies were so wildly successful that they helped boost the burgeoning drive-in genre to the stratosphere. Years later, they mostly exist as an example of what happens when good surf music collides with demonstrations of the latest dances and a series of increasingly bizarre, somewhat topical to the era and slightly racist comedy plots.
Every year for five summers, the story would go like this: Frankie and Dee-Dee would arrive at their favorite beach for the summer. They would be confronted with a nemesis – be it a direct rival for either’s affection, a biker gang trying to take over their turf on the shore or an ace surfer threatening to unseat Frankie from his throne as the king of waves. There would be dance numbers, a song or two, and an oddly cockeyed parody of some current event (youth culture and reluctance by adults to take said culture seriously, the British invasion, the evils of bodybuilders and bad publicity agents, and) and the only to come back together in a song-filled finale.
Warning: these movies don’t take themselves seriously, not even for a second. There are subplots involving superinteligent chimps, groovy Martian invasions, people who fall in love with mermaids, doppelgangers and sexy sea creatures rising from the deep on a lover’s prayer like some postmodern Venus. With all of this good-natured silliness, the series’ sudden flashes of racism stick out like a sore thumb (Chief Rotten Eagle, anyone?)
The whole series turns on one plot point: the chemistry between Frankie and Annette, and Annette Funicello’s lovely looks. Annette was the wholesome sex symbol of her generation, and without her and Dee Dee’s determinedly romantic outlook, the whole series would evaporate like so much seafoam.
Eventually, AIP - the B-movie mavens who financed all of the Beach Party Movies - would watch the sun set on their empire as the protest movie replaced the beach movie as America's youth movie haven. They tried to answer the cultural shift by casting Frankie and Annette in racing movies, but the series never took off. The final Beach Party movie, The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini, switched locales and took the setting to a haunted house, casting Boris Karloff and Basil Rathbone for a horror parody. By then both Annette and its ridiculously loopy sense of self were long gone.
But Annette's Dee Dee reigns iconic among the beach bunnies. Dee Dee is courageous, and even though that courage is somewhat limited to spell out what she will and won’t do for her boyfriend’s attention, she won’t sit still and let him treat her badly, dating other boys until Frankie's jealousy intervenes. This definitely makes her more of a post-modern Gidget; no languisher, she, and she's in a series that's not afraid to ask questions. The series' ultimate capper, a decades - later follow-up parody film, 1988’s sarcastic-tastic Back to the Beach, dares to explore what the sort of life Dee Dee yearned to experience with Frankie would do to a spirited woman like her, and has her struggle to break free of a life made of suburban numbness and clotheshorse-heavy consumption.
No wonder she doesn’t want her daughter to repeat her own mistakes and fall in love with a surfer. At least Eric Von Zipper didn’t wind up selling cars.
There's a moment in Back to the Beach when Annette tells Connie Stevens she sort of wishes she had been "the bad girl." The BP series is truly bizarre at times (my favorite is "Pajama Party," although yeah, it's racist), like AIP knew no one was going to pay much attention at a drive-in, so why not just throw in random crap? There are some fabulous Little Stevie Wonder performances by the way, and James Brown just walks off with Ski Party in his cameo.
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