Pajama Party
                                                                                  
Director: Don Weiss
Year: 1964
Rating: 5.0
It is really impossible to rate a film like this. It was truly of its time and 60 years later feels like a museum exhibit. But it perfectly sets out to do what it wanted to do back then. This fourth film in the AIP Beach films is stuffed with shaking bottoms, eye popping cleavage and enough goofiness to last you through a cold winter. These films were in truth about sex. The desire. The proximity. The inevitability. Not on the screen of course, that was all clean fun, but in every shake and frug, sex is being messaged.

 

This has oodles of very attractive women in it - guys too I suppose - but the camera is very much focused on the female anatomy. But for an oldie like me, my favorite parts were a musical number from Dorothy Lamour and the awful and yet wonderful performance from Buster Keaton as a Native American dressed up like one of those old Cigar Indian statues that used to be outside of drug stores. Keaton was one of the truly great ones, but by the 1960s work was sparse and so I am delighted that he got a gig here as bad as it may look today. The Great Stone Face remains intact.

 

There is also an invasion from Mars. They were clearly getting desperate for new plots. They send a scout in the form of Tommy Kirk to set the way for the invasion. He ends up descending into the garden of Elsa Lanchester, another delight, and she thinks nothing of it. Then he meets Annette Funicello and Mars seems very far away. Annette without Frankie! Like bacon without the fat. He only gets a cameo. Was he getting too big for Beach movies? She is linked with Lunk played by regular Jody McCrea. It feels all wrong.



Lots of the regulars are back - Don Rickles, Harvey Lemback and the Rats, Donna Loren gets a song, Candy Johnson gets to dance and a couple new ones who were to be in future films in the series, the busty Bobbie Shaw as the Swedish bombshell and Susan Hart as the dancer who melts candles. No wonder AIP founder James Nicholson married her this same year. The main disappointment in this one is the lack of a known musical band. But still a few songs from Annette. It is what it is. A time capsule into a time when sex was in the air but never on a bed.