Surf Party

"Surf Party" (1964) is essentially a musical version of "Gidget" (1959), with stuntman Jerry Summers in the Big Kahuna role and singer Bobby ("Blue Velvet") Vinton playing Moondoggie. Terry Wells (Patricia Morrow) and her two girlfriends (think three Gidgets) tow a travel trailer to the beach where her black sheep older brother Skeet (Summers) holds court as the hottest surfer.

Len (Vinton) runs the local surfboard shop (like Bear in "Big Wednesday" but not as spiritual) and interfaces with the resident fuzz (Richard Crane). Milo (Ken Miller-a sort of poor man's Nick Adams) is a gremmie (overeager novice) who aspires to membership in the surfer lodge; the rite of passage being a dangerous ritual called running the pier. Junior (singer Jackie DeShannon) serves as a love interest for the hapless Milo.

But the main story centers on adoring little sister Terry. This is her coming of age story and she is romanced by Len while learning (with the rest of the beach crowd) some unpleasant things about Skeet. Morrow was quite a beauty with a lot of natural charm. She would become relatively famous a couple years after this film, playing one of the main characters on television's "Peyton Place".

The production design is pure 1964 southern California but Skeet's beach house is a far cry from The Big Kahuna's hut. One glance at his bedroom furnishings will have you thinking Ed Wood, but all of this is eventually explained.

Like a standard musical these characters will burst into song at the drop of a hat and there are several numbers by actual singing groups. The Routers play "Crack Up". The Astronaunts play "Fire Water" and the title song. Almost everyone gets a song. Obviously this stuff is dated but some is rather good and even the worst is not unpleasant.

Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.

This film should be really a 10 on the entertainment scale because it is so hilariously awful. Made in black and white for the drive in circuit in 1964 maybe to cash in on RIDE THE WILD SURF and the AIP Frankie and Annette beach pix etc SURF PARTY is underwater it is so bargain basement. Four girls who all look the same drive daddy's massive convertible to 'the beach' towing the world's biggest cardboard caravan. Here they meet the beach set surfin' by day and groovin' by nite to the tunes hopefully soon the climb the pop charts sung by either THE ROUTERS (!) or THE ASTRONAUTS keenly seeking their big break. Bobby Vinton ad Jackie De Shannon are the stars and they are friends with someone called Milo who, in Big Wednesday style is gonna dare the waves to propel him through the barnacle encrusted legs of the local pier. All very nice, except the film has back projection surfing scenes, and most howlingly of all, 'creates' surf using the backwash from a speedboat - and doesn't disguise it. "Milo's going to shoot the pier" they scream in-between songs. The clothes are 60s fab and the cabana cottages are wonderfully cheaply decorated tiki style with sea-grass matting and shells and nets. I loved it. The audience screamed incessantly, and the songs and the gyrations that the cast are asked to perform are endlessly hilarious. Great fun. But not a 'solid' entry in the surf film / movie genre.

With the success of American-International's "Beach Party" movie series, it was inevitable that other studios would try to cash in on that success. Some efforts were made by major studios, while other efforts were made by independents, "Surf Party" being one of these independent efforts (though it was picked up by a major studio for distribution.) It's interesting to compare this movie to the "Beach Party" movies. It's done on a much lower budget, for one thing, filmed in black and white instead of color. The song number are less polished for the most part as well. But the biggest difference is that this movie's tone is much more serious than what was found in the "Beach Party" movies; even the ending isn't all that upbeat. I can only imagine what youths in 1964 thought of the somewhat downer tone. Probably they would also object to a storyline that quite often feels like it was being made up as filming went along. The atypical scripting does give the movie some interest, but I would only recommend the movie to those researching beach movies of the 1960s as an odd example of the genre.

Hey. Let's be honest: How can you NOT like a beach party movie from the mid-'60s? Nobody expects "Last Summer at Marienbad"... It's going to be free and breezy, some forgettable songs, more-forgettable comedy, and comely girls DARING to wear bikinis in a long-ago age when young American females were expected to be more abdominally modest in their attire. "Surf Party" is interesting on a couple of levels. It's one of the first rip-offs of the Frankie/Annette AIP beach-blanket bonanzas; those films, directed by William Asher, had just kicked off the previous year (1963) after Hollywood long toyed with the beach-party genre in romps like "Gidget", "Where the Boys Are" and the wonderfully obscure "Love in a Goldfish Bowl" from 1961. Somehow, though, none of the studios pulled the trigger before American International Pictures released "Beach Party" and thereby established what instantly became a turgidly static formula: Girl and boy meet on the sand, frolic without sex, break up and get back together, through it all sporadically grooving to some c-grade musical acts. (Many of these films relied, unfortunately, on hastily assembled side-men "groups" playing awful, tin-pan-alley stuff.) This one avoids that grating pitfall with legitimate musical talent on hand, although Jackie DeShannon's intractable acting style all-but negates her singing performances.

"Surf Party" is standard fare in that it's a movie aimed at young people but evidently made by middle-aged guys who know little about '60s youth. There's a smirky, bemused treatment of teen-age interests, serving only to freeze the movie in awkward, uninformed detachment - like a birthday-party performer trying to entertain kids by showing them the elements of algebra.

But this is different: "Surf Party" is in black and white - in fact, it may just be the only beach party movie not in Sea-and-Ski color. Worth a look, if only because its probable pre-Kennedy assassination (even pre-Beatles) filming gives it a lost-innocence appeal missing even from later Pepsi-Generation navel bombardments. Bobby Vinton is... well... Bobby Vinton. However, Patricia Morrow is quite watchable, and brings more acting "heft" than these movies generally demand.

Here's a double bill, in case you're sitting around without a life: Pair up "Surf Party" with "Catalina Caper", the late-1967 swan song of the surfin' safari flicks.

sitting in your folks' Town and Country wagon at the drive-in with a girlfriend and a couple other friends, watching this idiotic little piece of duck fluff called Surf Party? It's 1964, the Beatles have just landed, the Maddox and Turner Joy are--or are not--getting shot at in the Gulf of Tonkin, JFK is dead (that fracture will hurt forever), LBJ is going to win this fall.

America's sauce is strong, and surfer movies are all the rage.

What was that like, living in a bygone era, where no one could imagine the bodies stacking up like cord wood, Watts, MLK and RFK bled out, Tet, Panthers, Nixon, Kent State; what horrors the following years would bring.

Armstrong and Aldrin were still rookies. Nobody in your circle knew what pot smelled like. Heroin was only a problem for "Negroes." A sugar cube was for coffee.

What would it be like to step into that way-back machine . . .

And forget?