by Devin Morgan
Summer is here. It is 100 degrees here in the South – far from the much-more temperate Michigan City – and I refuse to go outside during daylight hours. I live four hours from the closest beach (though I’ve never been much of a fan). But without as much as a pool to cool down in, I find myself confined to my usual habits of late-night monster movie-watching.
The b-movies I find most engaging tend to take place close to the shore; often this is a predisposition towards Corman-produced American International Productions (AIP) films and the coasts of Southern California. Though last night, watching Del Tenney’s The Horror of Party Beach, I found myself transported to the opposite coast, on a beach outside of New York City.
An essential part of any coastal environment is the highway, where fast cars and motorcycles are ever-present. The Horror of Party Beach opens on this image: a car headed to the shore, surrounded on every side by bikes. Amid the cacophony is Hank Green (played by John Scott) driving his girl Tina (played by Marilyn Clarke). While Tina finds the slew of men on choppers a reason to bat her eyes and have fun, Hank uses it as an excuse to show off his sweet digs.
As the couple hits the beach, Tina takes a swig from a flask and is immediately admonished by her man; Hank informs her he’s got a big job at a science lab now and life isn’t just all fun and games (an ironic statement to make just a few minutes after arriving at the beach). Tina asks him where they went wrong.
This is just the beginning of the film's mean streak.
Off-shore, a tanker dumps barrels of radioactive material. The barrels drift to the ocean floor, cracking when they impact a sunken ship below. On the deck of the wreck lay human skeletons, which begin to take on fish-like features after making contact with the radioactive spill. From the murk, the gillman rises.
Back on shore, surf rock rings out from Stratocasters played by a four-piece band in identical striped button-ups. Tina dances in an attempt to woo the bikers. Hank becomes jealous and involves himself in the fray. Familiar enough scenarios for a movie set on the beach, at least on the surface.
The beach party film rose to popularity following the smash hit of AIP’s Beach Party in 1963. Directed by William Asher, the film follows Frankie (played by Frankie Avalon) and Dolores (played by Annette Funicello) as a couple whose relationship comes to blows following a trip to the coast of Southern California. In an attempt to make Dolores jealous, Frankie begins to flirt with a local barmaid, but in a twist turn of events, Dolores falls for famous anthropologist Professor Sutwell, whose worldly charms make up for his timidness towards the opposite sex.
The film is a cute romp featuring catchy musical numbers, bright Eastmancolor photography, and easily identifiable cultural signifiers – surfboards, rock music, and bikers – without any critical commentary or edge. AIP would go on to make nearly a dozen beach party movies; half of them starring Avalon and Funicello. Most of these films follow this same initial structure with only slight genre variations, though AIP wasn’t the only one who tried to cash in on the success of Beach Party. Tenney's The Horror of Party Beach was made just a year later, stripping away AIP’s chipper fun-in-the-sun attitude and Eastmancolor cinematography for something much darker.
Hank fights off some bikers who Tina has caught the attention of, demonstrating that he’s possessive enough to get in a fist fight, but not enough to communicate in a mature way. Tina runs off in a huff, making her way to an isolated rock along the shoreline.
But as we’ve learned, there are three types of men who prowl at Party Beach: good ole boys, bikers and gillmen. Tina ponders the state of her relationship across the choppy waves, as she is approached from behind by one of these humanoid fish. Step-by-step, the aquatic abomination shuffles along like a mime on the streets of Paris pestering for cash; its movements reminiscent of Mummenschanz, the theater troupe famous to American audiences for its appearances on Sesame Street.
Then, in the vein of Janet Leigh in Psycho, Tina is removed from the film despite all signs pointing to her continued presence. The attack is visceral, more so than even Hitchcock’s famous shower scene (which debuted only 4 years earlier). Here the focus is on Tina’s leg, which gradually goes limp through the course of the attack, as copious amounts of blood flow down her leg in streams. Although released just a year after Blood Feast, The Horror of Party Beach does not go to those gory extremes. The differences between the two films’ tone (H.G. Lewis takes far more glee in his violence) is as stark as the difference between Tenney’s use of black and white film vs. Lewis' use of Eastmancolor.
Tina is quickly replaced by Elaine (played by Alice Lyon), the daughter of Hank’s boss – the esteemed scientist Dr. Gavin (played by Allan Laurel). Elaine was previously seen being eyed up by Hank on the beach, a sign he was already on his way out of his relationship with Tina.
Asking what she is still doing at home, Elaine informs her father she doesn’t much feel up to going to a slumber party following the attack on her boyfriend’s former lover. Saying it would be impolite not to call, Elaine telephones and feigns illness to her friend.
On the other end of the line, Elaine’s friend states how much she’ll be missed, as she and the group of girls at the party set up a prank – a pail of water over the doorway. While they anxiously await for some boys to arrive, the girls flip out the lights. Shadows approach, crossing against every window and the open door. As the shadowy figures open the door, the girls see the pail splash one of the gillmen. The girls scream in terror and attempt to run out the back, only to be caught by another fish creature.
The end result is 20 dead girls and one brutalized survivor.
Two years before Richard Speck raped and murdered eight nurses (also leaving one survivor), The Horror of Party Beach often seems to be hinting towards some societal ill as-yet bubbled to the surface. It’s almost comparable to Targets (1968, dir. Peter Bogdanovich) – a film in conversation with the University of Texas tower shooting by marine veteran Charles Whitman. The prescience of The Horror of Party Beach is something to behold, both in the world of serial murder (a scare which reached its heights nearly two decades later) and ecological devastation (a crisis worse than ever as microplastics devastate our food supply, data centers create noise, light and water pollution, deforestation and fracking continue their path of destruction, and cancers proliferate in the wake of all this corporate-sponsored poison).
In many ways, the film feels much like a blueprint for Humanoids from the Deep (1980, dir. Barbara Peeters) in many of its set pieces. A film famously taken away from its director by producer Roger Corman, Humanoids had several graphic sexual assault scenes added. The subtextual elements found in Party Beach were made literal, against the will of the director Peeters.
When The Horror of Party Beach was made, the news cycle was not what it is today. Reporters did not run round-the-clock coverage of horrific acts (which today are constantly beamed directly into the brains of boomers and zoomers alike). Having not lived through the horrors of mass shootings, director Del Tenney and writer Richard Hilliard failed to grasp the magnitude of the death of 20 young white women, which would capture the public conscience in America.
Back at home, Elaine is admonished by the family maid Eulabelle (played by Eulabelle Moore), for her open display of survivors’ guilt. While The Horror of Party Beach was released the same year as the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Eulabelle on paper is a poorly rendered character relying on stereotype (particularly in her carrying a voodoo doll), though Moore brings a certain amount of pathos to the role. A weight is carried in her words as she reveals the tragedies she’s befallen in her lifetime.
Unfortunately for Eulabelle, two dead sisters do not compare to the massacre of an entire sorority. Further, allowing Hank to see Elaine so soon after this personal tragedy – and against Elaine’s desires – speaks little to the filmmaker’s understanding of traumatic response.
In the opening scene of Night of the Living Dead (1968, dir. George A. Romero), the female lead Barbara is attacked by the undead in a graveyard, and her brother Johnny is killed by a ghoul. After a narrow escape to a farm house, Barbara falls into a state of shock from which she never recovers. Trauma manifests itself in many ways.
While The Horror of Party Beach precedes Romero’s masterwork (his first of many) by 4 years, the film’s character drama often hints at similar undercurrents: the opening dialogue between Tina and Hank takes on a vitriol similar to the poisonous marriage of the Coopers in the Romero film, the chocolate syrup violence of both films is both particularly graphic, and both films have contrasting portrayals of the ever-present topic of race in America. Though having not written the character of Ben as a black man originally, Romero was conscious in his casting Duane Jones (who later played a character named Doctor Hess Green in 1973’s Ganja & Hess), and Romero had to work with Jones to discern how Ben’s actions would play to an audience. Romero’s film demonstrates an awareness of racial tensions, while the character of Eulabelle feels of a different, earlier era. In some ways though, The Horror of Party Beach feels in the lineage of a shift towards the more naturalistic drama of the burgeoning New Hollywood movement, and as such, is unknowingly acute in its liminality (the same year the film was released, the draft began for the Vietnam War).
Weeks after the slumber party massacre, three women drive into the coastal town on their way to New York City. The town seems to have mostly moved on from the violence, as the story of the deaths drift along as mere rumor, one which these women don’t really believe. They stop for gas and directions – only for the male attendant to overfill their tank in a rather sexually charged manner before he gives the women convoluted directions. They find themselves lost in the woods soon afterwards. In their trek down a backroad, they get stuck in the mud and are soon surrounded and killed by a half dozen fishmen. It’s unknown if their bodies are ever discovered; their families most likely never learn their fate.
Continuing their nocturnal savaging, one marine monstrosity tries to swipe two more women, though they are saved in the nick of time when one of their boyfriends drives by and picks them up. Rejected (or more appropriately, foiled in his attempts), the fishman wanders the strip and finds himself horny for a mannequin – a rubber homunculi grasping at a plastic visage. The fishman punches through the glass, only for his arm to be amputated.
Back in the lab, the Gavins and Hank Green are hard at work, staring at the arm of the fishman. They are still deep in thought when Eulabelle comes in and accidentally knocks over a receptacle onto the severed limb. A white hot fire spits as the poor maid bursts into hysterics. However, a weakness is discovered in this accident: sodium burns through the fishmen. As the scene dissolves, Eulabelle continues to scream.
Across town, two drunks stumble to their vehicles, communicating entirely via overdubs. They joke about being good enough to drive, only to slowly crash their cars into each other. In their stupor, they decide to walk home instead, laughing along the way. You get the sense they’ve known each other a long time. There’s a pleasant comfort in their friendship. Soon enough, they stumble upon a truck with its lights on. They slowly make their way around the truck and find a motionless man at the wheel.
One of the drunks pokes the body until it is revealed that a side of his face is completely torn off. The drunk runs to the back of the truck in a fright, but weeps when he can't find his friend in his intoxicated state. Much like Chongqing Pink, the power of friendship is enough to bring tears not only to them, but to us, the audience. In death, the drunks are brought back together.
Irresponsibly, reminiscent of Jaws fifteen years later, the town leaves the beaches open as the monsters continue to ravage many more individuals over the next few days – an ideology persisting through today as politicians fail to enact gun control or address and respond to environmental catastrophes and natural disasters. The town does little to get the necessary sodium to fight the gillmen, so Hank Green takes it upon himself to drive an hour to New York City and bring as much back as he can fit in his car.
Meanwhile, Elaine surveys a local lake with a Geiger counter. As two fishmen approach, she begins to panic and runs off along the foliage. Clambering among some rocky terrain, she slips and catches her foot between two adjacent perches. Twisting in an attempt to free herself, she notices something odd. In the black between the rocks, there appears to be nothing beneath. Each rotation of her leg widens the gap. Soon the gnashing at her ankle disappears, along with the solid ground beneath her.
Hank picks up the sodium and makes his return to Connecticut. His reckless driving does little to alert authorities.
Elaine resigns herself to her fate, succumbing to the abyss below. Her body drifts off into the center of the blackness. A starless night. A wading pool with no waves, she discovers her place in the universe is nothing at all. Smaller than an atom in relation to the body. A grain of sand against the black of the night.
As Elaine vanishes from the world above, so does any lasting memory of her: Hank speeds down backroads, he miscalculates a turn and barrels off a cliffside. His car hits the rocks below as the glorious mist of a sodium explosion sputters before swelling into a fireball.
At their combined funeral, Dr. Gavin eulogizes the loss of youth and life, as a permanent gray obscures the sun. He resigns from his position at the lab and gives himself to drink. Locking himself in his study day in and day out, his skin becomes yellow and sickly.
In her concern, Eulabelle tries her best to care for him in his advancing alcoholism, but little can be done for someone who has lost so much. She too resigns, living out the rest of her days in a peaceful retirement. She passes following a short, sudden illness.
The fishmen continue their reign of terror. The youthful crowds long since cleared, quickly replaced by a new breed of slimy gillmen. As the summers pass, they too grow and mature into adults. They fall in love with each other and cut their long-flowing gills and find jobs where they wear suits and ties, becoming productive members of society. Each new season brings an evolving crowd, as rowdy youth temper into working adults and their replacements start the cycle again.
Then one day those former beachgoers look back, unable to recognize themselves in the youth of today. They try to pass new laws to monitor what the teens wear and what they do. The youth may not even be allowed to go to the beach anymore, forbidden by statutes and limitations.
That is the true horror of Party Beach.
****
Devin Morgan (@fedafter12am) no longer hates the beach.