The Horror of Party Beach


The Horror of Party Beach is a 1964 American horror film in the beach party genre, directed and co-produced by Del Tenney. The film, described as "a take-off on beach parties and musicals," is considered to be one of the worst films of all time.

Plot

Near a small East Coast beach town, in broad daylight and a short distance from shore, a boat dumps a 55-gallon metal drum labeled "Danger Radioactive Waste" into the ocean. The drum opens upon reaching the bottom, releasing its contents upon a sunken ship and a nearby human skeleton. The skeleton is transformed by the "radioactive waste" into an aquatic, humanoid monster characterized by bulging eyes, fins, and mouth stuffed with appendages that resemble sausage links. The monster immediately ambulates toward the beach, where a dance party featuring The Del-Aires musical group is in progress.
Hank Green, an employee of local scientist Dr. Gavin, attends the beach party with Tina, his immature and drunk girlfriend. While dancing, Tina flirts with Mike, the leader of a motorcycle gang, as Hank talks with Dr. Gavin's adult daughter Elaine. Following a scuffle, Hank and Mike shake hands and ignore Tina, who swims to a rock jetty. Shortly after arriving at the jetty, and as The Del-Aires perform "The Zombie Stomp," Tina is attacked and killed by the monster. Tina's body soon thereafter causes a commotion when it washes ashore, still covered in blood.
The police investigating Tina's death enlist Dr. Gavin to "get to work on this." Dr. Gavin, who proposes Carbon-14 tests as a means to investigate the genetic structure of a tissue sample, comforts Elaine about her romantic feelings toward Hank. Eulabelle, Dr. Gavin's housekeeper and Mammy archetype, then suggests to Dr. Gavin that "the voodoo" is responsible for Tina's death. Elaine later decides to skip a slumber party with her adult, female friends. The monster, now joined by additional monsters presumably derived from the same radioactive waste-mediated, skeleton transformation mechanism, subsequently attacks the slumber party, killing over 20 of the attendees. The local media - including a young newspaper vendor who repeatedly shouts "Extra! Extra! Read all about it!" - then begins to report the attacks.
An indeterminate time later, three female travelers driving through town on a remote road experience a flat tire. While attempting to replace the tire, they are attacked and killed by the monsters. As Hank and Elaine attend an evening dance party at the beach, with music again provided by The Del-Aires, one of the monsters stalks two young women who are walking through town. Frustrated when the women are picked up by a passing automobile before it can attack them, the monster instead attacks female mannequins on display in a storefront window, in the process severing its arm. Dr. Gavin and Hank later study the severed arm, which is still alive, with Dr. Gavin characterizing the muscle tissue as the taxonomically impossible "a sea anemone, a species of protozoa." Although Dr. Gavin and Hank cannot devise a way to kill the arm, Eulabelle accidentally spills a container of impossibly-liquid metallic sodium on the arm, which kills it. Dr. Gavin thus realizes a chemical method for destroying the monsters: application of "plain old sodium."
Two drunken men stumbling through town encounter a dead, mutilated man inside a parked truck. shocked upon what they see one of the drunks is shortly thereafter attacked and killed by the monsters, thus representing the only males killed by the monsters. Following a montage of additional women being attacked and killed, the police initiate unsuccessful searches for the monsters by tracking the latter's trail of radioactive water. As Hank drives to New York City to obtain a supply of metallic sodium, Elaine performs her own search for the monsters at a local quarry, near where the female travelers were killed. Upon learning this, Dr. Gavin rushes off to assist Elaine, bringing a small amount of sodium with him. As Elaine is testing the quarry water, which registers as highly radioactive, she notices the emergence of a monster. Despite wearing dress shoes she manages to avoid an attack by walking away, but she then falls and becomes incapacitated by a bloody leg injury. Dr. Gavin arrives at her side and, by tossing sodium, kills an approaching monster in a fiery explosion. As additional monsters approach, Dr. Gavin engages one of them in extended Hand-to-hand combat. Hank then arrives with a large supply of sodium, kills the monster that is attacking Dr. Gavin, and with the assistance of police destroys the remaining monsters.
As a song by the Del-Aires plays on the radio, Hank later visits and nuzzles the recovering Elaine in her bedroom, wherein one of Eulabelle's Voodoo dolls has been placed on a bedside table.

Cast

Production

The Horror of Party Beach was directed by Del Tenney. His career began as an actor, working at the Los Angeles State College, appearing as an extra in films such as Stalag 17 and The Wild One. After moving to New York to act professionally, he worked as an assistant director in exploitation films, including Satan in High Heels. Tenney was approached by producer Alan Iselin, whose family owned drive-in theaters in Albany, New York, to make a double feature for drive-ins. He offered to put up $50,000 and come up with the titles and pressbooks if Tenney would also contribute $50,000. The titles Iselin created were The Curse of the Living Corpse and Invasion of the Zombies. The original scripts for both films were written by Tenney and his wife Margot Hartman. Unlike most beach party movies filmed to that time, The Horror of Party Beach was shot in black and white and on the Atlantic coast, with the primary filming site being the Shippan Point area of Stamford, Connecticut. The biker gang in the film was portrayed by the Charter Oak Motorcycle Club of Riverside, Connecticut.
The monster costumes were designed by Bob Verberkmoes, a theater set designer, and constructed at Gutzon Borglum's sculpting studio in Stamford. The costume heads sat atop the actors' heads, such that the actor looked through a hole in the costume neck. Two monster costumes were constructed,; upon completion, one was found to be too small for the hired stuntman/actor. Production assistant Ruth Glassenberg Freedman had a 16 year old son, Charles Freedman, who fit perfectly into the small suit, and he was subsequently recruited to portray a monster in the film. The "underwater," skeleton transformation scene was shot on a stage, with images of tropical fish in an aquarium later superimposed over the dissolving stage shots. Chocolate syrup was used for blood during the monster attack scenes..
The advertising for the double feature of Horror of Party Beach and Living Corpse capitalized on a gimmick first utilized by director William Castle, in which newspaper advertisements included a call-out that stated: "For your protection! We will not permit you to see these shockers unless you agree to release the theater of all responsibility for death by fright!" Theaters were encouraged by the distributor to have patrons sign a "Fright Release" before they took their seats. The trailer for the double feature also included this claim. Although billed in its promotional material as "The First Horror Monster Musical," all the songs heard in the film were presented as either soundtrack music or source music, as opposed to the style of a traditional musical with songs sung by central characters of the story. Ray Dennis Steckler's The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies also made the same claim a few months earlier. As a tie-in, a monographic fumetti comic book by Wally Wood and Russ Jones detailing the film's story was released by the Warren Publishing Company under its Famous Films masthead. It has a 35-cent cover price.
Edward Earle Marsh composed the film's soundtrack; Wilfred Holcombe was credited as the musical director. Marsh and Holcombe wrote three songs that were performed in the film: "Joy Ride", "The Zombie Stomp" and "You Are Not a Summer Love." Gary Robert Jones and Ronnie Linares, both of the Del-Aires and "Elaine". The Del-Aires performed all six songs in the film.

Reception

Release

The movie was distributed by 20th Century Fox. In 2018, it was released on Blu-ray by Severin Films.

Critical response

The Horror of Party Beach has received substantial critical attention, and has been recognized by film critics as one of the worst films of all time.
Upon the film's release, a reviewer for The New York Times wrote, "The most to be said for is that he has not stinted on the gore," and a review in Newsweek, which was negatively critical of the musical numbers performed by the Del-Aires, considered it the worst film in the previous twelve months, with the possible exception being Blood Feast. Additional negative commentary on the film has come from Thomas Lisanti in his book Hollywood Surf and Beach Movies: The First Wave, 1959–1969 and the author Stephen King Author and film critic Leonard Maltin awarded the film a "BOMB" rating, calling it "one of the earliest anti-nuclear warning films", but also stated that it failed to get its message across. Film critic Michael Medved included the movie in his books The Fifty Worst Films of All Time and Son of Golden Turkey Awards. The latter book recognized the movie as "The Worst Beach Movie Ever Made". Despite giving it a negative reception, Medved cited the film as the catalyst of his fascination for bad movies and described The Horror of Party Beach as a "good bad movie."
Joe Meyers in the Hearst newspaper blog for the Stamford Advocate wrote upon the death of Del Tenney: "Connecticut had its own Ed Wood, an actor, director and entrepreneur named Del Tenney who made a series of truly awful pictures in the Stamford area during the 1960s, the most notorious of which is Horror of Party Beach, a 1964 drive-in quickie about an atomic mutation that terrorizes Stamford."

In popular culture

The punk band Sloppy Seconds named one of their songs after the movie for their 1989 album Destroyed.
The Horror of Party Beach was featured in an eighth-season episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, an American television comedy series. In 2016, Shout! Factory released the MST3K episode as part of the "Volume XXXVII" DVD collection of the series, along with The Human Duplicators, Escape 2000, and Invasion of the Neptune Men.