Malibu Beach

"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.

Another teen centred comedy from the 1970's revolving around the beach, bikinis and the summer time. It's a comedy but the generic kind with no laughs, as it plays more like a romantic comedy. There are several different characters but we don't get to know them too much.

The cover poster art depicts a running gag where a large dog steals women's bikinis while they are lying on the beach. It was slightly humorous at first then got repetitive and wasn't funny. The end pay off wasn't anything special but we saw the collection of bikinis near the end. We wonder how they trained the dog to partake in this.

Overall it's a carefree teen summer comedy with some brief skin shown. Nothing and no character really stands out. The song playing throughout was decent.

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.

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!

With school officially over, "Dina" (Kim Lankford) gets a new job as a lifeguard at the local beach. Later that night she and "Sally" (Susan Player) are driving around and they just happen to get a flat tire. As they are fixing it two young men by the names of ""Bobby" (James Daughton) and "Paul" (Michael Luther) come along and offer to help out. Soon, as they become better acquainted, they begin to hang out and have a lot of fun. So much for the rather basic plot. To make things worse, there really isn't much comedy to be found and the music essentially consisted of about 3 or 4 songs played over and over again. Yet even considering all of that, this movie wasn't a complete waste due in large part to the beautiful scenery and the feelings of nostalgia this film managed to create. Likewise, both Kim Lankford and Susan Player weren't bad to look at either. Hey, it's great to be young and like most "Beach movies" this film celebrates it. But even so there are better beach movies out there. Still, for what it's worth, I suppose it will suffice on a cold, rainy night if absolutely necessary. As a result I rate it as only slightly below average.