Director – Don Weis, Screenplay – Louis M. Heyward, Producers – Samuel Z. Arkoff & James H. Nicholson, Photography – Floyd Crosby, Music – Les Baxter, Songs – Guy Hemric & Jerry Styner, Photographic Effects – Butler-Glouner, Special Effects – Roger George & George Zonar, Art Direction – Daniel Haller, Choreography – David Winters. Production Company – American International Pictures.
Martians send Go Go, their most inept lieutenant, to Earth to prepare the way for an invasion. In Malibu, assorted teenagers party on the beach and at the mansion of the clothing store owner Aunt Wendy. Connie’s biggest problem is getting her boyfriend Big Lunk to pay attention to her. In the house next door, J. Sinister Hulk believes that the fortune Aunt Wendy was left by her late husband is hidden somewhere in the house and contrives to steal it. His plans are thrown awry when Go Go turns up in Aunt Wendy’s house. Outfitting Go Go with a change of clothes, Wendy pushes him towards Connie with the intention of making Big Lunk jealous – only for real feelings to develop between the two.
American International Pictures had a hit with Beach Party (1963), which starred Frankie Avalon and former Disney star Annette Funicello as teenage boyfriend/girlfriend amid a series of light-hearted hijinks and rock‘n’roll songs set around the beach. Avalon, Funicello and other regulars were soon reteamed in a series of similar films that include Muscle Beach Party (1964), Bikini Beach (1964), Pajama Party, Beach Blanket Bingo (1965), Ski Party (1965), How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (1965) and Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1965), along with others that featured some of the stars but move further afield from the beach party setting such as Dr Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965), Sergeant Deadhead (1965), Fireball 500 (1966) and Thunder Alley (1967).
The Beach Party films, as the series came to be known, were shot quickly using a stock troupe of supporting actors – John Ashley, Dwayne Hickman, Jody McCrea and Deborah Whalley, sometimes playing the same, sometimes different characters. There were also guest appearances from other actors floating around at AIP at the time, including horror stars Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre and Basil Rathbone. A surprising number of the films feature fantastic elements – Dr Goldfoot is a parody of spy movie capers, Sergeant Deadhead launches Frankie Avalon into orbit, while How to Stuff a Wild Bikini had Buster Keaton as a witch doctor who conjures a bikini-clad girl, Beach Blanket Bingo featured a mermaid and Ghost in the Invisible Bikini featured Boris Karloff as a ghost (although not in a bikini).
The Beach Party films are simplistic, pitched to very much what was perceived to be the hip youth trends of the day. The first five minutes of Pajama Party, for instance, consist of a group of teens in their bikinis and swimming trunks boogying around a pool, before any of the characters are even introduced. They decamp from there to a beach volleyball game with more dancing, while a band plays.
The tone throughout is a slapstick one. Any of the scenes with comic villain Jesse White end with him knocking something over, dropping something in the pool, having food spilled on him or he slapping idiotic crony Ben Lessy. There is an extended sequence set around a fashion parade at a clothing store that manages to wind in musical numbers and slapstickery. As with most of the other Beach Party films, there is a madcap chase sequence with people racing through the streets in undercranked motion just like a silent movie, including here the gang on a motorcycle sidecar, Jody McCrea driving a convertible while Bobbi Shaw tries to make out with him and antics with a man carrying balloons and the vehicles crashing through a parade.
Annette Funicello with Tommy Kirk as Go Go the MartianChief Rotten Eagle (Buster Keaton) goes to scalp Bobbi Shaw
The worst part of the slapstick scenes is Buster Keaton, who was considered one of the great comedic talents of the silent era. Keaton appeared in four of the Beach Party films just prior to his death in 1966. The role Keaton has here as the Indian Chief Rotten Eagle reads as incredibly racist today and is surely a black mark on Keaton’s career. Watching the routines with Keaton running about with a tomahawk, trapped inside a clock, or he and perfume girl Luree Holmes squirting each other with various substances are a low point. The one who comes off far more accomplished is Elsa Lanchester, the Bride of Frankenstein herself, who in the 1960s had reinvented her career as a supporting character in assorted Disney films. In contrast to Keaton, she gives a dotty eccentric aunt performance that proves a good deal of fun.
Like several of these films, Pajama Party writes in fantastical elements. The Alien Invasion film was huge in the 1950s but by the early 1960s this had given way to the comic alien visitor, first on film with Visit to a Small Planet (1960) and followed by the reasonable success of tv’s My Favorite Martian (1963-6). In this case, we get Tommy Kirk, another former Disney star who appeared in a couple of the Beach Party films, cast as a bumbling Martian soldier who is sent in in advance of a planned alien invasion force. Other than making Kirk into a Martian, the SF aspect is of no real relevance to the film – Kirk could have been a regular teenager moved from out of town for all it matters to the plot.
This was one of a handful of films directed by Don Weis. In a career lasting between the 1950s and 1990, Weis directed a heap of tv episodes, including for classic shows such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, Batman, Planet of the Apes, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Starsky and Hutch, M.A.S.H., Charlie’s Angels, Fantasy Island, Hawaii Five-O, CHiPs, Hill Street Blues and Remington Steele, among a great many others. He made a few other films, including one other Beach Party film with Ghost in the Invisible Bikini, plus the tv movie The Munster’s Revenge (1981).
