Ridiculous...But a Liittle Disturbing

I vaguely remember "The Horror of Party Beach" coming out -- a little late at the end of the cycle of "1950's B horror movies involving teenagers and/or radioactivity."

I suppose you could take this one as a spoof BOTH of 50s horror movies AND 60's beach blanket bingo movies (though this arrived around the same year.)

The beach bodies -- men and women -- are certainly fit and there's a lot of 1964 flesh on display.

And then the silliness comes in.

A fight between and among beach boys and "hard core" bikers...which ends with one biker shaking the hand of the beach boy who bested him.

Some fairly bad rock n roll numbers...what WAS it about bands that could make the music without providing a truly memorable melody?

But above all the "sea creature men."

Famously, these monsters don't come close to the "reptile realism" of the creature from the black lagoon but rather look like exactly what they are: men wearing costumes.

Three key elements compete in the ridiculousness department: (1) Their mouths are full of hot dogs(what are these? Teeth? Tongues?) (2) Their skin makes them look exactly like artichokes and (3) Their fake plastic eyeballs pop out of their head "goofy" style, like toy dolls with ping pong balls for eyes.

Not very scary. And yet they start attacking a whole lot of victims -- pretty young women in the main, and a couple of drunk guys -- and the blood and gore is copious for 1964.

Well, some of the blood clearly looks like Bosco chocolate syrup. Hitchcock famously used Bosco chocolate syrup for the blood in the "Psycho" murders...but it looked like BLOOD in black and white. Here in this movie, the Bosco looks like ..Bosco. When the monsters attack the women, part of the attack is to smear Bosco on their faces(oh, we can read this as them clawing the faces of the woman and drawing blood, but it doesn't look like it.)

There's a pretty good blood gag when a drunk man grabs at a listless man at the steering wheel of a parked van and as the drunk says: "Hey, this guy doesn't have a FACE!" Nice effects of torn flesh and blood.

And so it goes with "The Horror of Party Beach" -- swerving back and forth from comical and ridiculous to relatively serious about the killing capacity of the dopey looking monsters.

Which brings us to the most disturbing scene.

A bunch of pretty girls inside a house living room for a slumber party. They are in nighties and pajamas. A group of the monster fish men come into the house and the camera lingers on the women all standing up and backing into each other in real fear(there are about 20 of them} and the monsters standing looking at them.

The young women aren't entirely believeable in projecting fear, but there are so many of them packed like sardines that we can't help feeling fear FOR them...they are a trapped back of ...fresh meat for the blood driking monsters.

Some of the angles on the women are bad, the cutting mismatched and amateurish, but the effect adds to the disturbing quality of the scene: these seem like real women, in real danger.

And then the silly looking monsters attack and the scene has its own sense of brutality. Again, Bosco getting smeared everywhere on all of the women as the monsters grab and manhandel them.

And then the monsters leave and there is a linger shot of all the women -- now all dead -- bloody and piled upon each other, a true massacre.

I know that far worse movies were made later on, with R ratings, like "Slumber Party Massacre" but THIS amateur slumber party massacre feels weirdly real and offensive.

Maybe its because the invading monsters give off a "home invasion vibe" -- entering the priviac of the living room and just standing there as the women huddle in fear. Maybe its the way the camera lingers on the women all pushing together in fear. Maybe its the way that the women are all lingered upon DEAD, in a big pile on the floor.

Its just too "real" for comfort. Particularly in these 2022-2023 times, when home invasion massacres of women are in the news.

But still, the movie is too ridiculous, and the monsters are too ridiculous, and the Bosco blood is too ridiculous, for the disturbing elements to overcome that.