Frankie and Annette, having grown up and put aside their beach-partying lifestyle, visit their daughter in Southern California and discover there's still some wild times left in them.
Director: Lyndall Hobbs
Stars: Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello, Lori Loughlin, Connie Stevens; Barbara Billingsley, Bob Denver, Tony Dow, Jerry Mathers, Paul Reubens.
Lori Eastside ... choreographer
Watched online, miserable copy: framed to occupy 1/4th of the screen, blurry, sped up to distort voices (only 1hr 21 min).
27 songs in the Soundtracks, most in the score, many only partial. FA and AF each performed on 2 songs, but not together. CS only participated a bit in a FA song.
It's been 25 years since the Beach movies, and I didn't like any of them very much, gave them all a 5. So it's no surprise I wasn't impressed here... except... that this a Paramount production, and those were all from a non-major studio. But with such a poor print, it's hard to see any benefit of more $$.
The Harvey Lembeck character was reinvented as a younger leader of a punk surfer gang, complete with spiky hair, leather jackets and lots of chains and (I'm guessing) safety pins. I think they echoed the HL gang with the leader saying something, and responding Riiight to himself, or the gang did. The audio was so bad, that if they explained he was the son of HL, I missed it.
Absent was any sort of character like Buster Keaton played in some of the films.
Bob Denver had more than a cameo as a bartender, but was describing the 3 hour tour that went astray, and at the end of the film Alan Hale arrived to bring him on board for the next outing.
BB, TD and JM played announcer and judges, respectively, of a surf contest. Pee-Wee Herman had a production number singing the song with lyric "bird bird bird, bird is the word" over and over and over. I wonder how many takes that took.
Having FA & AF bicker as a married couple was no more fun than having them bicker as unmarried and she trying to land him. LL as the daughter was underused, and they also had a son who was maybe in hs and rebellious, but not to cause too much grief. I think this was mostly about AF being jealous of FA's attention to CS, and LL concealing her live-in bf from dad. <big shrug>
Paramount, dir. Hobbs; 5
