Stuffing Invisible Bikinis

It has been a good weekend for watching utter schlock - over the past few days I've watched everything from strange continental swashbucklers with added bare breasts, giant ants and Patty Duke in her underwear calling Alex Davion a 'fag'.  But I rounded it all out yesterday with the piece de resistance of a double bill of AIP 'Beach Party' films.  How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (1965) and Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966) mark the end of that particular cycle, being the final two entries in the main series.  As is often the case with long-running series, (although the seven 'Beach Party' films were incredibly made in just three years), the later entries plainly show the strain as they try to maintain the winning format, while simultaneously varying the elements sufficiently to ward off staleness.  Getting the balance right between the two aspects becomes increasingly difficult: introduce too many new elements and the format becomes unrecognisable, potentially diluting what made it popular in the first place, but if the same old formula is repeated with minimal variation, then audiences will likely become fatigued by the repetitiveness.  Some of the sixth entry's - How to Stuff a Wild Bikini - variations, though, were forced upon it by circumstance: the series' regular male lead, Frankie Avalon, was concurrently filming Sergeant Deadhead  (1965) for AIP, so only appears in a handful scenes, (accounting for around six minutes of screen time).  Consequently, Dwayne Hickman stands in for him, playing an ad exec romancing Annette Funicello's Dee Dee on the beach.  The film also continues the series turn in to the fantastical, started in Pajama Party (1964) - which featured a Martian - and continued in Beach Blanket Bingo (1965), with a mermaid.  

This time around the framing story, which has Frankie doing his naval service on a remote Pacific island, involves Frankie engaging the services of a local witch doctor (Buster Keaton) to ensure that Dee Dee doesn't stray while he is away.  This involves the witch doctor creating a decoy with which to distract the surf dudes from Dee Dee - an empty bikini appears on the beach, parading up and down as if filled by an invisible girl, before it is 'stuffed' by beautiful girl (Cassandra, played by Beverley Adams), who suddenly appears in it.  Cassandra subsequently fails in her mission as decoy when Frankie's main rival, Hickman, rejects her to focus on wooing Dee Dee instead, but becomes the model for a campaign to change the image of bikers, devised by Rooney and Hickman.  Inevitably, Eric Von Zipper and his biker gang, The Rats, turn up and cause trouble for Hickman, who becomes their rival in a motorcycle race.  Zipper himself falls for Cassandra and joins her in the campaign  It all ends with the promotional motorcycle race.  As in earlier films, various fading stars turn up in cameos - as well as the aforementioned Keaton and Rooney, (who did the film to pay off a tax bill), Brian Donlevy turns up as Rooney's boss while Elizabeth Montgomery turns up for a brief cameo referencing her role in Bewitched.  With its claymation title sequence and fantasy elements, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini goes all out for zaniness and generally succeeds, while still retaining the core elements of the series.

Ghost in the Invisible Bikini, the seventh and final entry in the series, however, is less obviously a 'Beach Party' movie.  For one thing, it doesn't even take place on the beach, with a haunted house instead being the venue.  Moreover, both of the regular series leads are missing, replaced by Tommy Kirk (who had previously starred in Pajama Party and would have starred in How to Stuff a Wild Bikini if he hadn't have been arrested for possession) and Deborah Walley (who had previously appeared in Beach Blanket Bingo (1965)). Plot-wise, it is a pretty much standard haunted house comedy, with Basil Rathbone manufacturing various ghostly goings on in order to scare off the other potential heirs to a fortune, (as ever in these sorts of films, they have to stay the night in the haunted house in order to claim their shares), but falling foul of real ghostly apparitions.  The latter are provided by Boris Karloff as the deceased benefactor who has to carry out one good deed in order to get into paradise.  As he can't leave his mausoleum, the ghost of his lost love, played by Susan Hart, clad in an 'invisible bikini' (part of a circus act she performed with Karloff thirty years earlier, meaning that it would have pre-dated the invention of the 'Bikini' style two piece swim suit), actually provides the supernatural mayhem on his behalf, in order to frustrate the plans of Rathbone (Karloff's former lawyer).  What makes it a 'beach party' film are the presences of the nephew of one of the potential heirs surfing buddies and Eric Von Zipper and his biker gang, who stumble into the action by accident.

Ghost in the Invisible Bikini is clearly even more cheaply made than previous films in the series, with various sets recycled from AIP's Edgar Allan Poe films.  Its main points of interest are the presences of veteran horror stars Karloff and Rathbone.  Interestingly, the former's character wasn't part of the original film - shot under the title Bikini Party at a Haunted House - when it was first delivered to AIP, executives were dissatisfied with the final product and ordered cuts and the addition of new footage.  The latter forms a new framing story with Karloff and Hart, all of whose scenes were shot separately and edited into the film later.  Indeed, it is painfully obvious that a blue-tinted Hart has been rather crudely super-imposed on existing scenes.  The film, as released, is an anarchic comedy that is less obviously a 'beach party' movie than its predecessors, (it is far more reminiscent of contemporaneous comedies like Hillbillys in a Haunted House or even the various 'haunted house' entries in the forties 'Bowery Boys' and 'East Side Kids' movie series).  Nevertheless, it is quite good fun while it is on, although not very memorable.  Boris Karloff looks like he's enjoying himself, (not surprisingly, as he was getting paid for sitting around on a single set for a few days), while Rathbone gives a suitably irascible performance as an irascible character.

As previously mentioned, despite the number of movies produced, the 'Beach Party' series were a relatively short-lived phenomena, very much of its time.  It was built on the popularity of the earlier 'Gidget' series of films, (as well as being in the 'Beach Party; series Deborah Walley was also the second actress to play Gidget, succeeding Sandra Dee in the role) and subsequent TV series, (which provided a teenaged Sally Field with her first lead role), but the whole surf culture thing was, by the mid sixties, pretty much played out in pop culture terms.  The focus of AIP's youth orientated exploitation films quickly switched to new fads like biker gangs and drag racing, (usually with the same casts as the 'Beach Party' series).  Still, the 'Beach Party' movies, with their combination of adolescent sexual tension and naive innocence remain surprisingly enjoyable.