Psycho Beach Party

By:
In-House Review - Apr 16 2009

From the director of The Disco Years in the Boys Life collection comes this campy tale of shaking bikinis, gay muscled surfers, a wannabe surf babe with a split personality, a mom with an agenda, and a few severed body parts. Captain Monica Stark (Busch) is called to investigate a recent rash of gory Malibu murders and she's got quite a mystery to solve! Psycho Beach Party is a send-up of two Hollywood genres: the beach movies of the fifties and the psychological thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock whipped-up into a frothy madcap romp. Heading the cast is writer/playwright and well-known gender illusionist-performer Busch. The script is chock full of witty one-liners and double entendre for the whole family!

By: Amos Lassen

The 1960s were a time of surfing movies and this was when we really saw camp getting ready to make inroads on entertainment. However, it was not until the 80s that Charles Busch decided it was time to parody the surfer/slash movies of the earlier time.

"Psycho Beach Party", started off as a 1987 off-Broadway play that parodied camp, television of the 1950s, the slasher films of the 80s and almost everything else. It is not a great movie by any means but it is a lot of fun and we see the cast enjoying themselves and so we cannot help but join in. In effect, "Psycho Beach Party" is a parody of a parody, which explains why it's hysterical without ever rally being all that funny.

Lauren Ambrose is a naïve, perky tomboy, Chicklet, with no interest in sex (a role Busch himself originally played in drag) who, one day at the beach, is introduced to the surfing crowd. A series of bizarre slayings threatens to spoil the summer for her and her new friends. Everyone has a suspect in mind and some are pointing their fingers at a rhyming surf guru, a washed-up B-movie queen, a Swedish exchange student and Chicklet herself. It seems that Chicklet has psychotic spells during which she morphs into a vengeful sex goddess or a trash-talking Safeway cashier.

Charles Busch is Capt. Monica Stark, who's trying to find a killer. He investigates the Malibu murders in a spirited ensemble cast that kicks sand in the face of the teen beach movie and its heyday and we quickly realize that slasher meets beach party.

The ensemble cast is thoroughly unpolished but this works to the film's advantage and sometimes it is difficult to tell the really bad acting from the intentionally bad acting. In Malibu circa 1962, when a disembodied hand is discovered in the sand, but that is only a temporary distraction from the real manhunt. These teens go right back to their rear-projection surfing and they are led by aging surf-cult legend Kanaka (Thomas Gibson). He lives in a "Tiki Moderne" beach shack and the gang listens to what he has to say.

Chicklet wants to surf with the guys. There is more to Chicklet than even she knows and slowly Ambrose develops her character and obviously has great fun doing so. Chicklet's mother is one of those ever-smiling women and she is very proud that they have an exchange student living with them, Lars (Matt Keeslar). Sometimes he has a Swedish accent and sometimes not.

The film copies the look and sound of those 60's movies and it most definitively skewers the false innocence of American pop culture on the eve of the countercultural invasion. The humor is subversive and often off-color and racy (it does come from Charles Busch, after all). I have heard it said that the film is cross between a post-Freudian nightmare world of repressed violence and kinky sex bursting to get out.

Directed by Robert Lee King and written by Busch we get an overstuffed hybrid of 60's teen movie scenarios that are filled with references to Joan Crawford and other past Hollywood divas. We are reminded of the slang of the 60 with words like "fantabulous" and "daddy-o." The male surfers have a cockiness to them and there are some really funny wrestling matches between teen hunks that are homoerotic (a tad). If you try guessing who is the villain you will lost-the story expands into the ozone with alarming speed, takes another ludicrous twist to foil your expectations. I think the major point the movie tries to make is that there is no such thing as "normal."

"Psycho Beach Party" starts and ends at a drive-in and this is where we first meet Florence Forrest aka Chicklet. She is a typical teenage girl wondering why all of the teenage girls around her are becoming more sexually aware. She and her best friend seem to be the only ones at the Drive-In that are actually watching the movie. Two very important things happen at the Drive-In however; one, we witness a teenage girl getting her throat slashed by an unseen assailant and two, we witness innocent Florence become a very not innocent alter personality that we later learn is Anne Bowen. And so it goes. As an audience, we are simply asked to sit back and enjoy.

By: imaginaryfriend BOB