1h 39min | Comedy, Musical, Romance | 22 July 1964 | Color, WS
Director: William Asher
Stars: Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello, Martha Hyer, Don Rickles, Harvey Lembeck, Keenan Wynn.
Tom Mahoney ... choreographer
10 songs in the Soundtracks.
The plot is the problem: too much breadth, not enough depth. The characters who are repeated from the prior 2 movies are the same, and don't change at all. AF still wants FA to settle down, both in terms of his own lifestyle, and to marry her. Instead, he picks up another dangerous sport: drag racing.
Drag racing is introduced by way of the British mop-top singer Potato Bug, also played by FA in a dark blonde wig.
DR returns as the same person with a new name and new job: proprietor of the drag race strip (on the beach??? An unlikely use of real estate.) But he admits to being the body building proprietor we met before.
Then we also get KW as the millionaire who's trying to get rid of the surfers, and has invested time in teaching a "chimp" (man in chimp suit) to drive a car and surf, just to prove how low the teen culture has become, and therefore they should be institutionalized, or something. MH is a school teacher who tries to defend the teens, but just heckles KW.
And HL is back as Eric von Zipper, repeatedly giving himself "the finger" (the Himalayan zen suspension of motion and thought introduced by Bob Cummings in the first film), and bringing along his gang so the surfers would have someone to brawl with.
There's little to make sense of here, and that makes it tedious.
The big innovation is the skimpiness of the bikini bottoms: they're MUCH smaller than in the last film. Didn't notice the cleavage being more ample, though.
We got another song from (Little) Stevie Wonder, but the lengthy end credits featured some other song, again with Candy Johnson shaking her fringes. (The irony of her "power" to knock over men by aiming her hip-swing at them is that she has the most covered costumes of any young female in the film. No bikinis for her; not enough space for the fringe. And her costumes look identical to the past 2 films, both in design and color.)
AIP, dir. Asher; 5
