Marine scientist Otto Lindsay lives in a beach house on a small cliff overlooking a surf beach. His son Richard used to help him in his work with marine mutations but Richard is tired of a life of all work and no play so decides he's going to play as much as he can, with his girlfriend Janey and the surfing gang that gathers on the beach every day. He also resents his young and trampy stepmother, Vicky. The house is full of resentment. Otto resents his son's search for freedom and fun. He is also beginning to resent Vicky who is spending more time out of the house socializing (with other men, as we find out and as Otto suspects). Vicky resents Otto's single-minded zeal for his work. Everybody seems a little resentful toward Otto's assistant Mark who has been living in Otto's house since he got a permanent limp from a car accident caused by Richard. All this is laid out in the first half of the movie but the film begins with the promise of its title quickly fulfilled. Several bikini-clad beach girls are dancing to a song called "Dance, Baby, Dance" (co-written by Frank Sinatra Jr.!). One of them, Bunny, pulls a prank on her boyfriend Tom by sprinkling sand on his hot dog (literally) and running away. Hiding near a cave, she is attacked by a monster, pop-eyed and covered with seaweed, and clawed to death. The police take a cast of strange footprints found in the sand to Otto and he thinks they look like they belong to a giant mutated South American fantigua fish.
We then witness some of the psychodramas detailed above play out. Otto lashes out at his son's friends, referring to them as "loafers and tramps." Mark's hobby is clay sculpture, mostly of bosomy females. Mark thinks a bust he made of the late Bunny as a naked mermaid would be an appropriate gift for Bunny's parents and somewhat bizarrely, Richard agrees. Vicky poses for Mark's latest sculpture but rebuffs his romantic intentions, saying "Did you think I’d make love to a cripple?" Richard shows Mark a few minutes of surfing footage (to pad out the film to a little over an hour). Vicky rather brazenly heads out on a date with a man named Paul. The kids, apparently done mourning Bunny, have a midnight beach party dancing to their own guitars and bongos, singing a song called "Monster in the Surf," accompanied by a lion puppet named Kingsley. I am not making any of this up. Later that night, the monster strikes again, killing Tom, with the kids blaming Mark because he finds the body on the beach. Vicky gets home from her date and the monster claws her to death. Then Mark, sort of on the run from the cops, finds a huge rubber monster mask in the house.
Actor Jon Hall, B-lead in a number of exotic adventure movies of the 1940s, stars in this as Otto and also directs. Critics tend to lump this cheapie in with
THE HORROR OF PARTY BEACH from the year before, and there are certainly similarities, but this film, despite many weaknesses in writing and acting, is a notch better. If nothing else, the score, a mix of surf music and slinky jazz, and written by Sinatra Jr., is pretty good—"Dance, Baby, Dance" is still in my head as I write this. The monster looks exactly like a big phony rubber outfit, but as we discover, it's supposed to. The beach boys and girls are peppy and attractive. The two young leads, Arnold Lessing as Richard and Elaine DuPont as Janey (both pictured at right), are good, balancing out a bit the somewhat tired performance of Hall and the occasional overacting of Sue Casey as Vicky (who went on to a surprisingly lengthy career which included a small role in 1999's American Beauty). Mark is played adequately if a bit uncomfortably by Walker Edmiston, who had a career as a voice artist and children's TV show host. Another draft of the screenplay wouldn't have hurt. The character of Mark, who at various times comes off as suspicious, sweetly innocent, and a little pervy, could have used some fleshing out. Otto, who is not important to the plot until he is, is a big zero. The motivations of the killer are left unexplored. Vicky is really the most developed character because the young frustrated trampy wife is such a cliche. It's amateurishly filmed but taken for what it is, a Jon Hall vanity project (I assume since he starred, directed and did the cinematography), it's empty-headed fun. Pictuerd top left are Lessing and Edmiston. [YouTube]
