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House band in this film:
The Bobby Fuller Four (Bobby, bassist and
brother Randy Fuller, guitarist Jim Reese and drummer Dalton
Powel). Fuller’s band
was very hot in the L.A. club scene in 1965, which likely led
to their casting.  
After an appropriately creepy sounding
Baxter title instrumental piece (which is full of one of his
favorite instruments, the theremin) the major characters and
basic storyline (an attempt to rip off the beneficiaries of an
estate, watched over by wigged apparition Susan Hart, the gal
wearing the "invisible bikini," left) are introduced.
After the gang shows up, the first
vocal piece we abruptly jump into is Nancy Sinatra (fully
clothed, no bikini) rocking out the gang with Geronimo
beside the pool (again, sorry,
no beach at all in this picture), backed a somewhat silly-looking
Bobby Fuller Four (to say they're overacting is
an understatement). The song itself
is pure junk food: quick, enjoyable and completely
unfulfilling; presumably, the title of the number has something to do
with what the kids scream as they dive into the pool.
As dispensable as the piece is, Nancy is a joy to
watch; the beautiful 25 year old (who looks 17-18 at
best, this lady aged well and decades later still
appeared much younger than she was) has massive screen presence, to
the degree one wonders why her film career didn't
subsequently go farther than it
did.
After more intermediary
nonsense involving Eric Von Zipper, we go back to pool, where the Fuller
group is blasting away at some hot but unnamed
instrumental number, while the kids all
dance, albeit they're doing that while playing with
some silly rotating-ball on a stick toy-thing. The whole scene
sort of comes across as a hula-hoop contest (which at first
appearance seems rather dumb, but the gimmick has grown on me
over time, perhaps because my six and nine year old
children think it's pretty cool ). As mindless as the sequence
is, it offers a brief opportunity to appreciate what Fuller and
his boys could do. Their piece is full of nasty sounding fuzz
guitar and the "wall-of-sound" chorus really
rocks. Per the recommendation I made about listening to
the title number in Beach Blanket Bingo,
the best way to really appreciate what is going on musically
here is to crank up the volume. Once you do, you'll begin to
understand why the subsequent demise of this band (Fuller
died -- under mysterious circumstances -- just a few months
after Ghost was released) is to this
day seen a huge loss; rock historians actually place Fuller
right up there with Buddy Holly, in the "oh, what could have been"
context.
O.K., now for some casting/storyline points to avoid
potential future confusion (again, the script here is a mess, and
it's easy to get lost): Nancy Sinatra (Vicky) likes Aron Kincaid
(legitimate estate heir "Bobby," a.k.a."Goo Goo"), but he's
repeatedly drawn away by Quinn O'Hara ("Sinistra," right) who
is Basil
Rathbone's
Conspirators Ripper and Sinistra
("Reginald Ripper," also right) daughter.
Ripper is a felonious
attorney
who -- as
a
corrupt executor -- is attempting to rip off the estate,
with the assistance of his
evil-and-sexy-but-completely-blind-without-her-glasses
daughter. The scene where Sinistra meets Bobby is amusing,
after dad insists that she take off her glasses, she starts off
flirting with the wrong guy, and when she finally starts hitting on
Bobby, she intentionally ignores Vicki (which leads Sinatra to
continually whine "I'm Vicky....I'm Vicky.....I'm
Vicky").
Confused
yet?
If not, don't
worry. The scriptwriters will fix that soon
enough.  
After Sinistra
"seduces" Bobby, she takes him into the haunted mansion and starts
her attempts to knock the heir off. After mixing him a potent
cocktail, she misses the fact it is dissolving the glass it's in,
but Bobby notices and begins to catch onto the fact this girl
is...er...strange (left). Ghost Hart sends him a
subliminal message to run, and he does. Sinistra doesn't
notice, however (she's misplaced her glasses) and starts mixing him
another drink. This is the setup for a brief but amusing
musical number, Don't Try To Fight It
Baby. Quinn O’Hara makes minor history here, by
virtue (a) of being the first woman in the series to sing a
solo piece while wearing a bikini and (b) executing the closest
thing to a dead-on Marilyn Monroe imitation AIP ever
produced (right). The song itself is almost folk-bluesy in
nature, a moderate tempo number that Quinn sings in a breathy,
almost spoken soprano as she bumps and grinds (in relatively
blatant fashion, PG-13 by contemporary standards) around a suit of
armor she thinks is Bobby. Given a genre focused on
pretty bodies, the beach and music, it's interesting that AIP didn't
get around to scripting in this presumably basic element (a song
from a temptress in a bikini) until the final film.
We then cut to the driveway, where Reggie's bumbling
co-conspirators are showing up. They consist of a
rather haughty character named "Princes Yolanda," played by
Bobbi Shaw, who is accompanied by Buster Keaton replacement Benny
Rubin (Keaton was originally cast to appear here again as Shaw's
incompetent partner, but became seriously ill with lung
cancer as production started, dying just when it was
concluding in February 1966). They are
followed by Von Zipper and his gang (right), who have
tracked the conspirators. Amusingly, the
audience is presumed to understand that happened because they
already know -- from having seen Pajama
Party, of course -- that Von Zipper is
obsessed any character played by Bobbi Shaw. The
motorcycle gang senses the conspirators are after
something, so they spontaneously decide to break
into the "haunted house" to look for "the
money"....yawn....
...well, somehow we end up in the girls bedroom,
where the female segment of the "good kids" are. Among them is
perky little Italian singing import Piccola Pupa – who had a short
but hot mid 1960s trajectory (during her brief period of visibility
she even made it to the Ed Sullivan Show), cast here as an
"exchange student," which was a quick way for the screenwriter to
come up with an excuse for her obvious accent. However,
you don't hear any Italian as this fourteen year old bounces around
the girl’s bedroom, belting out the upbeat ballad
Stand Up And Fight (left). Like
O'Hara, Pupa is wearing a bikini (a modest blue one, as opposed to
the low cut, glittery gold job O'Hara has on) but as the saying
goes, no one ever remembers who came in second.
Presumably, the verses of Piccola's number have something to do with
convincing Nancy Sinatra to be more aggressive (ergo, more
provocative, ergo, will you please put on a %#*&$!!
bikini) in her attempts to wean her love interest Bobby away
from Sinistra. However, the song is really just an excuse
for another tacky cheesecake display, as Piccola wiggles and
jiggles in her bikini while prancing on beds and chairs. She's
a more seasoned singer than O'Hara, though, which distracts us
somewhat, so the number isn't quite as "obvious" as what we saw
earlier.
Shortly thereafter, we're back out by the pool at night,
again with the The
Bobby Fuller Four and the dancing gang. Similar to the group
featured in the prior movie, this band had a true hit ( “I Fought The Law” ) which
we'd love to hear, but the script calls for something else, which in
this case is the upbeat ballad Make the Music
Happy. It's not as bad as one might think, and we
even get to hear a full verse of the thing before the
editing pulls us away for more dull Tommy Kirk-Deborah Walley
storyline (these two really come across as an appendage in
this film, given neither sing a note in it). Fortunately, that
sequence is brief and then we're back to the musical number by the
pool. Everyone here is having fun
except Nancy Sinatra, who -- now finally in a
bikini (Piccola's ballad must have worked) -- is
sitting forlornly
by herself, surrounded by wildly dancing kids.
However, Bobby reappears, having been terrified by Sinistra; he
smiles at Nancy, they walk towards each other and then........a
thunderstorm breaks out and drives everyone inside. 
We then
enter almost twenty Villians Jesse
White and Basil Rathbone acost ingénue
minutes of total
mish-mosh De
Deborah Walley silliness,
which really doesn't doesn't
warrant much discussion. Suffice to say it involves the
reading of a will, an escaped mad gorilla, mysterious hands
appearing out of walls, a haunted dungeon-like "wax museum,"
monsters popping out of closets, Eric Von Zipper bumbling things as
usual, an old Perils of Pauline style "villains-tie-the-ingénue-to-a-platform-slowly-heading-towards-a-roaring-buzzsaw"
sequence (above and right) and the inevitable fistfight. If
this all sounds quirkishly engaging and entertaining, it really
isn't; confused, disconnected and forced are more appropriate
descriptions. There is music behind all this (Baxter having
fun with that theremin again), but it's not particularly
memorable.
After the
villains are defeated, the ending credits this time take a
different direction than the predecessors. No crazy dancing
solo chicks, no repeat of an earlier sequence. Instead,
we get a pajama-ed Bobby Fuller and his group playing an
instrumental reprise of Geronimo down in
the dungeon/haunted wax museum, which is now populated by wildly
dancing kids. It's happy ending time as Walley and Kirk and
Kincaid and Sinatra all dance together, even joined by a pair of the
wax "dummies" at the end.
And
that's the peculiar close to a unique series of
films. |
