Malibu Beach

This is one of the few 70's drive-in movies I actually remember seeing in a 70's drive-in--well, sort of. My older female cousin had actually taken us to another drive-in movie, but she was occupied with her boyfriend, so my younger cousin,my brother, and I got out of the car to wander around and we saw bits of this movie showing on another screen--namely the recurring scene with the dog stealing girls' bikini tops. It's pretty tame and goofy in retrospect, but it sure is pretty memorable when you are ten years old.

Seeing the entire movie years later, I can't help but have some misbegotten affection for it. It is one of those free-spirited, anarchic late 70's teen films with no real plot to speak of except for a bunch of California teens cruising around, partying, and having sex (ironically, pretty much what the young drive-in audience at the time was probably also doing). The lead Kim Lankford, who plays a female lifeguard having her first sexual experiences, never really appeared in anything after this, but she was an appealing beauty and quite memorable here. Co-star Tara Stroheim was involved in a lot of Roger Corman-type 70's drive-in fare like "Hollywood Boulevard" with Candice Rialson. The actress with the most interesting career, however, is no doubt Susan Player who was in "The Pom-Pom Girls" (a somewhat more famous drive-in movie a lot like this), but she also appeared in Italian sex comedies like "Cugini Carnal" ("Carnal Cousins")and the British-Italian exploitation film "The Adolescents" with Koo Stark.

You don't need to know any of that to enjoy THIS movie though. It's no cinematic masterpiece by a long shot, and it's fairly tame as far as sexploitation flicks go, but is an enjoyable time capsule of a bygone era.

This movie has just about everything you would expect from a beach movie: Bullies, nerds, lifeguards, sharks, obnoxious brats, police, drugs, "chicken" races, horny teachers, sluts, topless beach babes, and surprisingly a bikini top stealing dog!(this gag was repeated in the classic "Hardbodies").Hey, with so much thrown into one can, you have to like something! And I like it a lot.This movie, I believe accidently, came off as a genuine "slice of life" movie that could have been better if it had stuck to the characterizations and not tried to be something for everyone.It was a nice try though!

Malibu Beach doesn't have much in the way of a plot, but it doesn't really need one:it's more than happy to wander aimlessly from scene to scene with a 'why worry?' attitude that is perfectly suited to its carefree teenage characters, all of whom are far too busy living for the now to think about the bigger picture.

There's sexy young lifeguard Dina (the gorgeous Kim Lankford), handsome high-schooler Bobby (James Daughton), promiscuous babe Glorianna (Tara Strohmeier), desperate nerd Claude (Roger Lawrence Pierce), Margie the hot-dog stand girl (Sherry Lee Marks), and the older (but none the wiser) bodybuilder beach-bully Dugan (Steve Oliver) to name but a few. As the viewer, we get to tag along with these regulars of the beach scene as they party in the sun and frolic in the hot summer nights.

While it's far from ground-breaking stuff—a series of frivolous vignettes in which our on-screen pals party, swim, dance, race, fight, and hook up with each other—it's a lot of fun while it lasts, a reminder of a time of life when all that mattered was having a laugh with your friends (whilst trying to attract the attention of the opposite sex).

Another vapid beach movie from Crown International Pictures, who certainly worked hard in churning out plenty of low budget drive-in style movies in the '70s and '80s. I've yet to see a Crown picture that didn't have some gratuitous nudity in it, and sure enough, this being a beach party film after all, there's the requisite bikini-stealing-dog scenes in it.

Otherwise, this is an unmemorable waste of time, without many sub-plots or indeed much in the way of plotting at all to recommend it. A group of teenagers hang around at the beach, fall in love, and smoke pot. They also have sex - lots of sex. A couple of cops show up, one of them turns out to smoke pot as well, while the other complains about the state of the world. An overage muscle guy tries to hit it off with the women but gets into a couple of fights instead. The production values and quality of the acting are as poor as you'd expect, leaving this an entirely pointless little movie.

"Malibu Beach" is one of several beach-themed movies Crown International released in the late '70s/early '80s. Until its recent resurrection in several DVD box sets of Crown International movies it was pretty much forgotten, and it doesn't take too long when watching it to guess why. To be fair, the movie, while low budget, never looks really cheap. (Except maybe for the scene with the shark's head, which looks worse than the shark built for the Italian JAWS rip-off GREAT WHITE.) The movie also has an attractive and likable cast. But the movie quickly becomes boring because there is essentially no plot here - it's just a bunch of vignettes loosely connected with each other. And the various attempts at humor throughout are extremely predictable with their execution and punchlines. Still, I will admit that the movie could have been much worse to sit through.