cinema history class: the horror of party beach

Session: Man/Corpse/Woman into Monster, Week 2
Movie: The Horror of Party Beach (1964)
Directed by Del Tenney
As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL

Plot:
Nuclear waste dumped into Long Island Sound causes plants, fish and dead sailors to merge into hideous blood-sucking monsters. Hilarity ensues.

Reaction:
There was a whole lot of crap in this movie to hate. The sound is abysmal and the cinematography was worse. The bosco blood looked more like motor oil after my 5,000 mile change.*And the acting -- oh, God, the acting sucked like you wouldn't believe.

But somehow I enjoyed this movie. I think Joe put it best when he said it was "more ingenious than it was good." It was a really enjoyable mashup of the 1950s horror and beach party genres. THey tried to present it as a musical as well (even calling it one in the trailer), but that's bullshit. It's has some music built into the plot (in the form of a deservedly-unknown band called the Del-Aires), but it's not a musical per se.

The thing about it that it didn;t take itself too seriously. It didn't fall into the trap of being self-consciously and purposefully bad (Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, I'm referencing you). But there was still no pretension to high art.

Humor abounded. The men in monster suits, the dialogue... This was the crappy little movie that could.

My favorite line? As some women are discussing current events in their car, one notes that there are monsters murdering people and drinking their blood. Her friend responds, "Imagine -- being that thirsty."

Ratings:
Me: 8
Dave: 9
Ethan: 6.5
Joe: 9.8
Sean: 3 out of 4

Extras:
Joe had just gotten a special edition release of Night of the Living Dead, which is among his favorite movies. He brought it so we could all watch a brief interview with Joe Russo. At one point, Russo was talking about the film's faults, and brought up the fact that they broke one of the rules in filmmaking by "crossing the axis." They did this, he explained, because they had never learned not to. Neither Joe nor I knew what he meant by that, and asked. Sean explained -- it has to do with the way dialogue is shown onscreen, but I don;t want to bother going into detail here. If you care, read about it on Wikipedia. Keith, for his part, called it "film school bullshit." The point is that Joe and I both argued that it doesn't matter if they broke a rule if it works in the movie.

I realized that this was a case of great timing. I had, just a few hours earlier, written a post on this blog about some second-guessing I was doing in my songwriting. It comes down to worrying about whether I'm breaking a rule. Seeing Russo's comments and reacting viscerally the way I did helped convince me not to worry. If the song sounds right, then it doesn't matter what rules it breaks.

Thanks, Joe.

*I like to get the synthetic oil so I can go farther between changes.