IT'S A BIKINI WORLD (1967)

On a sunny day at Malibu Beach, we meet Mike Samson, the local chick magnet who loves playing the field; when we first see him, he's lolling on the beach with three bikinied women clinging to him. His hulking buddy Woody has a girlfriend named Pebbles, and she brings a visiting friend, Delilah Dawes, to the beach. Mike hits rather aggressively on Delilah but she spurns him, which he's not used to, and he takes this as a challenge. When Mike overhears Delilah tell Pebbles that she prefers intelligent guys, he decides to pose as Herbert, Mike's glasses-wearing book-reading nerd brother, and winds up hitting it off with Delilah. Meanwhile, Daddy, the beatnik-ish manager of a beach night club called The Dungeon, makes an alliance with magazine publisher Harvey Pulp who wants to start a magazine called Teen Scream: Pulp will sponsor a series of contests using customized products of Daddy's. The first contest is a skateboard race which Delilah decides to enter in order to teach Mike a lesson. Mike-as-Herbert helps her learn the ropes, but on race day, she comes in second to Mike. This just fires her up to enter more contests. Meanwhile, she and Herbert grow closer, even though Woody manages to show up at the wrong time and messes up an evening which Mike hoped would be a makeout session. Just before the climactic event, a cross-country race involving skateboards, cars, swimming and even camels, Delilah discovers that Herbert is actually Mike and she's even more determined to whup Mike's ass.

This is a fairly listless late entry in the mid-60s beach movie genre, filmed in late 1965 but not given a wide release until spring of '67. Most of the beach movies were relatively low budget B-films, and this is among the lowest, even though there are a few nice stylistic touches. Delilah's first walk on the beach is seen reflected in the sunglasses of a number of beach bunnies, and there is a very funny (and surreal) gag during the skateboard chase involving a giant pane of glass that Mike and Delilah manage to skateboard through as no there was no glass there, but which someone else runs through and shatters. It's in widescreen and shot on real locations, but the colorful gloss of the American International beach flicks (with Frankie and Annette) is sorely missed here. I like Tommy Kirk, a Disney kid actor and star of a handful of other beach movies, but he's more goofy-cute than handsome, and certainly not the studly hunk that his character is supposed to be; in fact, he's much more believable as Herbert. As Kirk is a second-string Frankie, Deborah Walley (as Delilah) is a second-string Annette and has little chemistry with Kirk. Bob Pickett is amateurish as Woody, but his main fame is as Bobby "Boris" Pickett, writer and singer of the huge 1962 novelty hit "Monster Mash" which still gets airplay around Halloween. Famous cult actor Sid Haig (Captain Spaulding in the Rob Zombie movies) is amusing as Daddy, though some comic relief stuff involving Pulp's sidekick McSnigg falls flat.

The 90-minute movie is fairly well-paced until the end when the cross-country race, presented in nine phases, goes on for an excruciatingly long time. But fans of 60s' one-hit-wonders may enjoy the musical performances by the teenage group The Gentrys (their top 5 hit was "Keep On Dancing" though that's not the song they do here) and The Castaways (who perform their big hit "Liar Liar"). Eric Burden and the Animals—who had several hits—sing "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" though Burden seems fairly uninterested in trying to convincingly lip-sync. At one point, the kids see a double feature of Attack of the Crab Monsters (a real movie which we see a clip from) and Gorgonzilla (uh, not a real movie but cute joke). In his bachelor pad, Herbert puts up a pop-art poster that is a blow-up of a frame from the famous comic strip Terry and the Pirates, of interest to me as I am currently watching the Terry and the Pirates 1940 movie serial on TCM. This is not something I'd recommend to everyone, but until the last 15 minutes, it's fairly painless. My main complaint: not enough genuine beefcake on the beach. Pictured are the two faces of Tommy Kirk. [TCM]