CATALINA CAPER (1967)

Larry, a guy in a hat and large 'nerd' glasses, sneaks into a surprisingly ugly and unsecured museum and steals an ancient scroll worth millions. He takes it to his boss, Arthur Duval, who is spending the summer on a yacht near Catalina Island with his wife and teenage son. Duval is supposed to acquire the scroll for a dealer named Lakopolous, but his plan is to make a duplicate of the scroll and pawn that off, then return the original. But Lakopolous is suspicious, in addition to being as duplicitous as Duval, and steals the scroll only to have it wind up at the bottom of the bay. Then he hires two divers to find it. But this is only one plot thread. The other involves college students Don and Charlie; Don, from Arizona, has never seen the sea (Charlie calls him a "desert rat") and rich Charlie invites him to spend the summer with him at Catalina so they can do some diving, some dancing and some girl-watching. While blond studly Charlie has girls literally hanging on him 24/7, Don pines away for Katrina, a Swedish girl whose boyfriend is one of the divers working for Lakopolous. And so the two plotlines collide, leading to some very mild action and very tedious comedy.

Despite having a poster that proclaims "Wild adventure—International intrigue!," this is just a low-budget beach movie, a couple of notches below the level of the Frankie & Annette movies of the mid-60s from American International Pictures (AIP). Don is played by Tommy Kirk, a former Disney kid star who was let go for being gay and who was trying a forge a career in that awkward stage between teen and adult. He made a couple of beach movies for AIP, but in this one, for Crown International, he was pretty close to the bottom of the barrel. At 26, he could still pass for a student, but one verging on dissipation. His buddy Charlie (Brian Cutler) is not unattractive, but he has zero personality and it's a mystery why every single beach babe is hot for him. Robert Donner provides perhaps the worst comic relief in any professional movie as Fingers O'Toole, a slapsticky maladroit ass whose schtick consists entirely of falling (on sidewalks, on floors, into water). The one genuine chuckle I got: when two of the beach dudes realize their dates have run off to hang with Charlie, they start dancing with each other. Maybe the real problem here is the director, Lee Sholem, because most of the actors (including Kirk) seem like they are giving a first line reading in every scene. Lyle Waggoner (the handsome fellow on the Carol Burnett Show) has a small role as one of Duval's divers. The only other actor of note is Michael Blodgett (the stud in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls) as a harbor security guy—he manages to give a professional performance, and he's credited as choreographer (though what we see of the dancing is mostly close-ups of boys' and girls' asses wiggling). The one high point: Little Richard performs a song called "Scuba Party" on the ferry boat over to the island. That happens fairly early on; you can safely grab a nap anytime after that. Pictured are Cutler and Kirk.[YouTube]