So in You’re Invited to Mary-Kate & Ashley’s Hawaiian Beach Party, those little pug-nosed Olsen twins from TV’s Full House go to Hawaii and throw a beach party. Native island women dance the hula, so Mary-Kate and Ashley don grass skirts so they, too, can learn how to seductively sway their 8-year-old “hips.” The girls … Continue reading You’re Invited to Mary-Kate & Ashley’s Hawaiian Beach Party (1996)
Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello first frolicked together in Beach Party, the start of American International Pictures’ loose, teen-oriented franchise concerned with sun, sand, surf, song and squeaky-clean sex. The pair plays Frankie and, um, Dolores, young lovebirds who venture toward the SoCal waves for a vacation. Ironically, neither is the film’s real star. That … Continue reading Beach Party (1963)
Whether they are accepting or denying, giving in or holding back, every teen struggles with their sexuality in the same beautiful way: begrudgingly perverted. This plaintive shamefulness is the style that Eugene Jerome deals with his outright horniness, far more than I originally remembered, in this adaptation of Neil Simon’s Broadway play of the same … Continue reading Brighton Beach Memoirs (1986)
For the fourth movie in the Beach Party series (and the third sequel in 1964 alone!), AIP shook things up beyond the cast’s hips by adding a new director (Don Weis, The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini), a sci-fi element and many, many sets of PJs. While Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello indeed return, they’re … Continue reading Pajama Party (1964)
Harvey Huntington Honeywagon III is on a mission: to prove that Frankie (Frankie Avalon), Dee Dee (Annette Funicello) and the rest of their group of sun-kissed, surf-lovin’ teenagers spending their days and nights on Bikini Beach harbor “an abnormal preoccupation with sex,” so much so that the rare jolts of activity in their brains are … Continue reading Bikini Beach (1964)