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mst3kproject · 6 years

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The Beach Girls and the Monster

This movie stars Sue Casey from Catalina Caper and Elaine DuPont from I was a Teenage Werewolf, but I really don’t think I have to justify reviewing a movie called The Beach Girls and the Monster on an MST3K blog. The only people who are going to want a movie called The Beach Girls and the Monster are people who are fascinated by godawful movies. Let us proceed.

A beach party is interrupted when one of its choreographically-challenged bikini babes is strangled by a seaweed-draped fish monster that even the Horror of Party Beach would laugh at. The cops find mysterious footprints, which local scientist Dr. Lindsay declares belong to the South American Fantigua fish, a known man-eater! Dr. Lindsay also takes the opportunity to rant about how the killer was doubtless one of those good-for-nothing surfer kids his son Rich hangs around with. Then we take a right turn from The Horror of Party Beach into General Hospital as we get a taste of life in the Lindsay household. Not only are Rich and his father at odds over whether surfing is a worthwhile hobby, Rich’s stepmother Vicki is playing the two against each other while cheating on her husband at every turn, including with Rich’s friend Mark, a struggling artist who rents their spare room.

I’m going to stop there, because your brain is probably lagging behind as it tries to process the ‘fish footprints’ plot point. Yeah, no kidding, that’s in the movie – the footprints of a fish! Is Fantigua supposed to be the scientific name of the Creature from the Black Lagoon? I mean, yeah, there are fish that can crawl across land for short distances, but they still don’t have feet.

That’s not even the weirdest thing in the movie, either. The first victim, a girl called Bunny, had at one point posed for a sculpture Mark was working on. After she dies, he gives the piece to her parents as a gift… which is nice enough, except that the sculpture is of Bunny as a sexy mermaid! What the fuck, dude?

At one of the beach party scenes, we have to listen to Rich sing an uninspired and unmemorable ballad called More than Wanting You. The nicest thing I can say about this song is that it’s still better than the music in Wild Guitar. Immediately afterwards, however, we’re treated to a much more entertaining nonsense song called There’s a Monster in the Surf, which is sung by Rich’s girlfriend and a lion hand puppet wielded by a guy in a fake beard. I have no explanation for that. None.

There’s the bit where Mark’s walking on the beach and comes across a group of girls wiggling their butts at the camera in time to music. There’s nobody else around, they never notice him watching them, and they’re totally separate from the party he arrives at later in the evening. They’re just there, in a way that suggests they’re like the rocks and the waves – they’ve been on this beach since the beginning of time and will be until the mountains crumble. I wonder if they’re a PokeStop.

There’s the jazz interlude when Vicki comes home drunk and staggers around the house for a while before being attacked by the monster, which was lying in wait for her at the top of the stairs (again – yes, this happens). The music suggests we’re supposed to be watching a strip show or something but all we’re doing is sitting there looking at Vicki’s ass as she pours herself a drink and reads a love letter. I can tell it’s supposed to be sexy but the only reaction it actually gets out of me is huh?

Huh? is my major reaction to Vicki as a character, actually. The first time we meet her, she’s trying to cozy up to Rich, who tells her to get lost. Then she accuses Dr. Lindsay of loving Rich more than he loves her, and tries to turn him against Rich’s friend Mark. Then she goes to pose for Mark, who really just seems to want to get on with the sculpture he’s making of her, but she comes on to him, kisses him, and then rejects him and calls him names. She cheats on her husband and tells him its too late to save their relationship – and throughout all of this, there’s never any sense that she has a goal. The only thing I can imagine all this behaviour leading up to is becoming a rich divorcee, but the idea of a divorce is never even brought up. As far as I can tell, she just likes messing with people’s emotions.

With all this interpersonal drama going on throughout the movie, it’s actually easy to forget about the monster. After its first murder it vanishes into the woodwork and never makes another appearance until almost the end of the movie – and the end of this movie is a letdown on almost more levels than I can actually count. In order to discuss this I’m obviously going to have to spoil it, but I have a hard time believing anybody cares about spoiling themselves for The Beach Girls and the Monster.

All right, so the monster kills a guy on the beach and Mark helpfully frames himself by being present, stealing a police car, and driving home, because he suspects that Dr. Lindsay has something to do with the monster – after all, we’ve heard Rich talk about his father’s papers on mutations in sea life! The monster kills Vicki, then goes after Mark, who stabs it with a kitchen knife and rips its head off, revealing… Dr. Lindsay in a stupid monster costume! Dr. Lindsay then steals Rich’s girlfriends car and drives off in pain, and the police chase him until he goes over a cliff and explodes. Roll credits.

There is almost more disappointment here than I think I can encompass in my remaining review space. First of all, we were told about the man-eating fish and then about science experiments that can mutate animals to several times their normal size. I don’t know about anybody else, but I was expecting that Dr. Lindsay had either created a fish monster or else had temporarily turned himself into one. Nope, he’s just a dude in a monster suit. I guess this was an attempt at a misdirection? Okay, sure, but if you’re going to misdirect your audience, it should go without saying that the real answer needs to be cooler than the fake one! Shriek of the Mutilated also had its monster turn out to be a guy in a costume, but that was a cover for a cult of cannibals!

Then there’s the explanation of why Dr. Lindsay did this. It’s never spelled out for us explicitly, but it seems like his motive was to scare Rich away from hanging out with the beach crowd so that the two of them could spend more time doing science together!

And there’s the car crash ending. Car crashes are like house fires in Frankenstein movies… they’re a way of ending the story without anybody actually having to do anything. The entire ending is calculated to avoid anybody suffering any consequences or Rich, who is technically our protagonist, actually having to behave like a hero. Mark stabs his attacker, but dies immediately afterwards so that he can’t be held responsible for a murder, even one committed in self-defense. His death also means that Rich no longer needs to look after his struggling friend. Dr. Lindsay runs away so that Rich cannot confront him or ask why he has done these things. The car crash finishes him off so that there’ll be no need to bother with an arrest or a trial or anything, and Vicki’s death means that Rich will inherit everything. Everybody who was making Rich’s life complicated is dead and now he gets all his daddy’s money and can do whatever he likes.

This is not what the audience wants at the end of this story. The middle of this story wasn’t what we wanted from this movie anyway – we wanted a story about a seaweed-covered fish monster killing people in swimsuits. If the reason we’ve spent so much time with the Lindsay family instead is because the monster is actually Rich’s dad in a costume, we need to deal with that. Having him drive over a cliff is a way of not dealing with it. The cop telling Rich ‘he thought he was doing it for you’ isn’t anything like the same as having Dr. Lindsay himself say, ‘I was doing it for you!’. Closing on a shot of Rich staring at the burning car doesn’t tell us what effect all this is going to have on him. It’s all a giant cop-out!

There are a million other little weird things here. There’s the movie’s insistence on calling Dr. Lindsay an oceanographer when everything we’re told about his research clearly makes him a marine biologist. The photograph of Rich that sits on his father’s desk is clearly one of actor Arnold Lessing’s headshots. There’s the wallpaper that from a distance looks like it’s covered in emojis. There’s surfing footage that serves the exact same non-purpose as the wrestling in Samson vs the Vampire Women. It all sucks.

Is there anything nice I can say about The Beach Girls and the Monster? Well… there is one thing. This is the only movie I can think of where the monster has a perfectly gender-neutral body count. Dr. Lindsay kills exactly four people: Mark, Vicki, and surfer kids Bunny and Tom. Two men, two women, and like Bunny, Tom was killed in his swimsuit with the only visible injuries being some scratches to his face. Is this an intentional statement on how women are treated in monster movies? I fucking doubt it. Not in a film with this many jiggling ass shots.

#mst3k #reviews #episodes that never were #the beach girls and the monster #manly beach dance #it's beginning to look a lot like fishmen #60s

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