Thirteen years after the dog that was "Gidget Gets Married" (with Monie Ellis as Gidget), Caryn Richman manages to find some of the warmth and depth that Sally Field breathed into the character some twenty years earlier. She doesn't get much help from the script, mind you.
Once again the clock is reset; Sandra Dee's Gidget turned sixteen in the summer of 1959, Sally Field's was "fifteen and a half" in 1965, and now Richman's is twenty-seven in 1985. And boy can she fill out a swimsuit.
Dean Butler is okay as Jeff, but not spectacular. Allison Barron does a really nice job as Kim, Gidget's fifteen-and-a-half year old niece (ring a bell?) In some ways she is the "Gidget" of this film, and her performance is imbued with echoes of Sandra Dee's treatment of the character. BTW she looks awfully nice in a swimsuit too. David Knell is sweet and funny as Albert Winslow, her wimpy, geeky love interest, and Vincent Van Patten is suave, slick and despicable as Mickey, Albert's rival, a bronzed-Adonis badboy.
Don Stroud is of course a natural as the Kahuna, and William Schallert is quite good as Russ Lawrence, though there is something fundamentally disturbing about the same actor playing both Patty Laine's and Gidget Lawrence's dads. Anne Lockhart is good enough as Larue (it doesn't hurt that she resembles Lynette Winter), but she doesn't have much to do in the story.
The film doesn't contain anything you could really call a plot, but the characters are well defined, and as far back as the 1957 novel, Gidget stories were stronger when they were more about characters and relationships than story line.
The original music is downright awful (well it was the 1980's), and oddly enough old fifties tunes are employed here and there as underscoring--I say "odd" because Richman's Gidget should have been a teen in the seventies.
Overall, a fun film for all its flaws.
