How to Stuff a Wild Bikini
                                                                                    
Director: William Asher
Year: 1965
Rating: 5.0
I am at heart a completist. And with this sixth in the AIP Beach Party film series, I am done. There is in theory a seventh but I saw that one a while ago and it doesn't take place at the beach. So, it is time to say farewell to Annette, Frankie and the overgrown gang of teenagers. It has been silly fun. What teenagers went to in the early 1960s before everything changed. Before innocence lost. Before nudity and sex in the movies. Before Woodstock and Sgt Peppers. Before Bonnie and Clyde.

 

This is more of the same. Lovely young women in bikinis. Strapping young men on hormones. With one big change though. Frankie is in the naval reserve and serving off on a tropical island. Annette is on her own and the baggy clothes she wears makes one suspect that Frankie left her with a gift. In fact, Annette was pregnant in real life. Frankie is doing ok for himself with a local girl. The wonderful Irene Tsui, about the only non-Caucasian I recall in the series. I always have to mention when I come across her that 30 years later she has a small role in one of my favorite Hong Kong films, Comrades: A Love Story as an auntie. If you ever need a good happy cry, watch that film. It is near perfect. Annette is being romanced by Dobie Gillis aka Dwayne Hickman.

 



Like all in the series, it brings on some veteran actors and gives them a lot of screen time. Mickey Rooney plays a publicist working for Brian Donlevy. Buster Keaton is back, his third appearance in the series. This time as a witch doctor. In a way, it is sad seeing the Great Stone Face in films like this, but after a long lull in his career, Keaton was being re-discovered by the public in films, TV and commercials. And his old films were making it to TV. At this time, unknown to him, he was dying from lung cancer. He never slowed down.

 

Rooney was working a week for $5,000 to pay off taxes owned. He is great in this and sings a few songs. Donlevy only shows up a few times, but is also in a musical number. I don't know if it was the budget, but there are no well-known singers in this one. Not even Donna Loren who had a song in a few of the films. There are a lot of musical numbers but they are nearly all ensemble numbers. A few fairly good. The Kingsman do sing, but sadly not their big hit Louie Louie.

 

The woman of desire in the film is Beverly Adams. She didn't have much of a film career, but might be remembered by some as Lovey Kravezit in three of the Dean Martin Matt Helm film series. She also married Vidal Sassoon. And lastly, Elizabeth Montgomery who was married to the director William Asher has a cameo at the end as a witch. She, of course, was Samantha on Bewitched. These films for me are strictly nostalgia for a genre that came and left over a few years. Made pop stars out of Frankie and Annette and became a part of our culture. Dreadful films really in many ways, but there was nothing else like them.