The Beach Girls and the Monster

The Beach Girls and the Monster is a relentlessly dumb 1965 "horror" film, with a bunch of curiously skinny (for their era) beach babes dancing on a beach before one of them gets killed by a guy with a rubber monster mask that looks totally fake. There are a few guys with them but nobody comes to the rescue, and there are three bloody claw marks across the beach bunny's beautiful kisser.

Next we get a scene where a scientist and a cop have a conversation while the scientist (oceanographer) holds out a plaster cast of a "fantigua" fish, or something that looks like it was taken from the right arm of Joseph Merrick when he died. He's kind of a roly-poly dude with a completely square attitude about what goes down with all the beach bums and gals in bikinis. "The boys are all loafers, and the girls are little tramps!" he complains, or something to that effect.

I think someone else gets killed, but the real meat of the story involves the son of the oceanographer, who is one of the beach bums, and plays groovey guitar to his hot gal pal. Both of them seem to be getting hit on by his pervo stepmother, who is a real you know what, it all sounding suspiciously like the build-up to some video you might download from Pornhub.

Except, no dice. It is 1965, after all, and this is a 'family affair" (no pun intended).

(Not that, you know, I personally know anything about Pornhub, or three-way stepmother vids, or any such thing. I'm going totally by what I have heard, ya' understand? Nope. Completely innocent. Got the wrong guy, pal.)

I haven't mentioned a single character or actor name so far, I know; but, that hardly seems to matter here. The actor/director playing the oceanographer is "Jon Hall." I would have sworn that Roger Corman had something to do with this particular celluloid epic, but, no, I didn't see his name involved in the credits at all.

Girls dance. They party some more on the beach. A limping sculptor (who gained his limp in the accident caused by the oceanographer's son) lives with the oceanographer, the horny stepmother, and the son, and sculpts the stepmother, and has the monster's face as a mask, and maybe...well, I'm confused on alot of plot points here. But who gives a damn?

The monster may be something the oceanographer created in the lab; he complains that his beach bum son use to love to help mutate fishies in the lab. Everyone parties on the beach all night, and there is a lot of off-brand surf music that sounds like a shitty mock-up of The Ventures. Frank Sinatra Jr. is credited, unbelivably, with the title theme, but I'm not certain how much of the soundtrack ol' Frankie baby did himself, because most of it sounds like the same shitty surf and garage rock band.

Lot of skinny girls dance around in bikinis while the rubber-suited stunt man in the laughable monster mask and costume of "sea weed" (that looks like somebody ripped sections out of a trash bag and strung them along his body) kills the stepmother, and all the car chases are actually filmed against a blue screen. Anyway, it ends with a fiery car crash over a cliff.

While not exactly being Citizen Kane, I suppose if you have one hour and six minutes of time to waste, it's passable monster-movie fare. An amusing sidenote is that the beach bums all seemingly carry around toys and props, like Roadrunner guns that unfurl flags that say "Bang!" when you pull the trigger, and toy bows and arrows. There's also a man with a lion puppet. How quaint.

The Beach Girls and the Monster is also known as Monster from the Surf, and stars Jon Hall , Sue Casey , Arnold Lessing, Elaine DuPont , and Walker Edmiston. There. I said their names. Now, I gotta run. There's a fake dude in a bad rubber monster suit chasing me around some skinny 1960s beach babes wearing a ripped up Hefty garbage sack. Cowabunga, dude.