Director: Robert Lee King
Writer: Charles Busch
Starring: Lauren Ambrose, Nicholas Brendan, Charles Busch,
Matt Keeslar, Thomas Gibson, Amy Adams, Kimberley
Davies
Both a loving tribute and merciless send-up of
exploitation cinema, Psycho Beach Party gathers the best tropes from
three decades of B-movies and tosses them into a joyful stew. Based on the
long-running play written by Charles Busch, the film's influences are written
right in the title: the Frankie and Annette teen romps of the 1950s and 60s
mashed up with the Hitchcockian psychodramas and slasher films of the 60s and
70s. As a capper, Psycho Beach Party then takes the sexual subtext of
all those genres and turns it into text, both with single-entendre sex puns and
even less subtle kink. More playful than graphic, the film revels in young
sexuality in ways that feel more like Beach Blanket Bingo than Halloween,
yet still treats the audience to the image of Marvel Anne (Amy Adams) lecturing
Starcat (Nicholas Brendon) on responsibility while covering her naked pudenda
with nothing but her hands.
Chicklet (Lauren Ambrose) is an innocent teen who, unlike
every other teen, goes to the drive-in to watch the movie and is both
fascinated and repulsed by all the necking going on in the surrounding cars.
But Chicklet has a dark secret. Whenever she sees a circle, another personality
takes over and she becomes the aggressive dominatrix, Ann Bowman (gasp!). Foul
mouthed, lewd and sophisticated, Ann Bowman proclaims her desires and hatreds
with operatic flourish: "Who do I have to fuck to get a hot dog in this
place?"
Later, on Malibu
beach, Chicklet meets a cadre of surfers led by The Great Kanaka (Thomas Gibson).
She's immediately attracted by college dropout and first year psych student,
Starcat and begs the boys to teach her to surf. Starcat insists that girls
can't surf, citing first year Freudian nonsense about penis envy and the male
hunting instinct. When Chicklet takes her case directly to Kanaka, Ann Bowman
steps in, and not only gets Chicklet into the surf, but makes Kanaka her sex
slave.
Meanwhile, a killer is stalking and murdering the teens one
by one and police captain Monica Stark (Charles Busch) realizes that Chicklet
is at the center of the mystery. Could Ann Bowman be responsible?
If it all sounds ridiculous, it's because it's meant to. The
period movies Psycho Beach Party lampoons were no less so. Using naive
and flat out wrong ideas about insanity, 60s psychodramas told thinly veiled
cautionary tales about female hysteria and sexual repression.
"Schizophrenia" (later called multiple personality disorder or dissociative
disorder) was a go-to diagnosis for crazy people in the movies because it was
lurid and strange. Norman Bates being the most famous example.
Psycho Beach Party plays on the plot details of those
earlier works beat for beat, only it has the sense to turn it into a funny. In
essence, Psycho Beach Party is the cinematic equivalent of watching a
dozen B-movies all at once and riffing them with your giggling friends. The
brilliance of Psycho Beach Party is
that you never have to have seen an Annette Funicello movie to get the joke,
because like all great satires, Psycho Beach Party is both a parody of
the genre and a beautiful example of the genre.
There's also a luau dance battle. Luau. Dance. Battle .
- Katherine Turner