Catalina Caper

There are only three things that I can say complimentary about Catalina Caper, one was that it offered some nice scenery of Catalina beach and the beach city of Avalon, Little Richard sang a number and Tommy Kirk got a needed paycheck. After his exile from Disney Studios and mainstream Hollywood, he probably needed the work and as we know he was taking work from wherever.

I'm sure it was the tourist board of Catalina Island that commissioned Catalina Caper, just make lots of nice cinematography of our island and then put some kind of story on it. Kirk plays a kid from Arizona where they don't have beaches, he's a self described 'desert rat' and he's there with buddy Peter Duryea to learn the beach scene.

Little does he know that he gets himself innocently involved in the stealing of an ancient Chinese scroll from the Ming dynasty by the parents of one of the beach kids. Despite his parentage the kid is honest and the beach gang unite to return the scroll and save the parents from jail. It's all frighteningly dumb.

A few laughs from Robert Donner who rivals some of the great slapstick comedians of the day in number of pratfalls he takes as an inept insurance investigator. The songs which are just grafted into the film are all right. Kirk and Ulla Stromstedt are clearly too old for the parts they play.

Catalina is a beautiful place from which dumb stories are located.

For starters, I usually don't watch Tommy Kirk movies. Most of us who have seen this piece of celluloid dung saw it on MST3K. When Volume 1 came out and included the films without the running commentary, I decided to see how bad some of these things actually are. My God what a fool I was.

The "plot" here is that some thieves decided to pull a bait and switch using a stolen scroll on some rich guy. The scroll gets lost due to incompetence while they're showing the goods to the rich guy's lackey. This could be a poor plot (not good, but would suffice to make a B movie) except for the fact that they decided to throw in a bunch of kids who get mixed up in the whole thing. Between the lousy music (Little Richard did OK, but the others were terrible), dancing, scuba footage, and attempts to develop love interests there should be something holding this together besides bad jokes and a loose caper "plot." On top of all of this, the "talent" seemed to not really care what was going on, so the results are predictably crappy.

For God's sake, don't watch without MST3K.

You'd have to be out of your mind or detached from all common sense to find some redeeming value in this clunker. The plot seems to concern guys, girls, sand, a scroll and Mork & Mindy's Exidor doing pratfalls. Oh, and there are musical numbers, many musical numbers. These elements are strung together very loosely to form some sort of plot, but what's there on screen will make you scratch your head. Little Richard pops up and sings a catchy little dittie and shows everyone else involved what talent is. Best part of the film is when all the girls slap all of the guys and storm off. The next scene is a musical number and then everything is forgotten! Oh to be young and foolish and working on a beach picture. Mary Wells sings the title song "Never Steal Anything Wet."

I could not imagine watching this without Joel and the bots.

Tommy Kirk acts like he'd prefer to be anywhere else. A cameo by Little Richard does nothing for his career. The music is awful, the dialogue terrible, and the plot (something about a stolen painting and a lot of young girls in bikinis) was incoherent. A real stinker.

Even by 60's beach party movie standards, this is really cheesy. Actually, awful is a more accurate term. I guess this was intended to be a fun beach party movie but somewhere along the line, it turned out to be a physically and psychologically draining experience. Bad acting all around. Lots of awful music, including a little number in which Little Richard humiliates himself. And a lot of *ahem* comedy that falls flat on its face (quite literally in the case of the obnoxious pratfall guy who serves as the would-be comic relief). And to top it all off, thrown into this mess, making the movie even more convulted than it already was, is a subplot involving an ancient scroll stolen by a bunch of bungling jewel thieves.

This movie was turned into a classic episode of the dearly departed MST3K, so I can't really say this movie turned out to be a complete waste of film. But if you dare watch this soul-sucking movie without the company of Joel Hodgson and his robot pals, you might end up with the urge to jump out the nearest window to put yourself out of your misery.