I’ve seen some goofy monsters.
Hell, I like the goofy looking monsters in Island of Terror.
But sometimes, the monster is too goofy for the needs of story.
That is the case with the Horror of Party Beach, where the titular horror is right up there with The Giant Claw for the title of goofiest monster put to film.
It’s hard to watch this movie, partly because only the TV edit survives in mass media. If the original version exists, it’s apparently only available in the screen-cap comic that was made.
Also, it’s really, really a bad movie: with thirty year old teenagers and some of the dumbest lead characters I’ve ever seen. The only way to watch this one is with Mystery Science Theater 3000.
Biology
No bad movie is complete without really bad science to back it up. To give you an idea of how bad the science is in this movie, the movie’s scientist, Doctor Gavin, wants to use Carbon-14 testing to check the genetic information of a sample of the creatures. In case you were unaware, C-14 testing is used to test the age of a specimen, not the genetics. This is quite possibly the oldest and most inept form of technobabble I’ve yet herd.
The “Horrors” are sometimes called zombies, and not without some reason. They were created by radioactive materials dumped near a public swimming area (!!) which irradiated the skeletons trapped in a sunken fishing ship, creating over a dozen of these monsters almost instantly. I know movies can compress time for convenience of storytelling, but that’s a little much.
And they’re damn goofy looking. I mean, it’s like they have a mouth full of pickles or hotdogs. With their heads locked in stagnant blank looks for the most part, except for a single shot of one embarrassing hand puppet with googly-eyes. Others just have lumpy heads with generic monster grins. I guess they could only afford so many goofy monster masks. The ‘pickles’ may act as feeding tubes, with little syringes hidden in them when they grab victims and drain them of their blood, similar to a mosquito.
Yes, this does mean that they are radioactive vampire-zombie fish men. No, it doesn’t make them any good.
They are beings of mostly waters, more-so than humans. They’re given many comparisons to “Sea Plants” and Protozoa”. I prefer to compare them to jellyfish, because it causes other people to have painful flashbacks to Sting of Death.
Because of this, they sort of explode when exposed to metallic Sodium, but otherwise physical attacks are like hitting a lump of Jell-O. Why no one bothers with explosives or shotguns can be chalked up to the general incompetence of the ‘heroes’ in this movie. At one point, one of the monsters has its hand cut off by a broken glass window, their construction is so flimsy. Strong, perhaps, but not much against even a simple knife.
It’s difficult to tell if the monsters are very stealthy, or the people around them are just that stupid and unmotivated. I’d lean towards the later, just because of how lazy and stupid the ‘heroes’ in the movie really are. If those guys are smart enough to survive, what does that say about the ones who didn’t? And by God, there are a lot of victims too. Even in the edited for TV versions that is available, there are 27 victims (all but three of which are women), and that’s not including a long montage of monster attacks and one skinny dipping scene cut from the broadcast version due to nudity.
Doctor Gavin explains that because of how decomposed the original bodies were, their organs cannot ingest food normally.
“Now think back and remember that I said the bodies mutated were skeletonized.”
Alright, moving on. So the monsters drink the blood of other humans to gain the nutrients they need. Not a bad setup compared to the rest of the science in the movie. Well, aside from the skeleton thing.
Unfortunately, the characters keep calling them “Giant Protozoa”, which really doesn’t work, especially considering that entire group has been currently split into multiple sub groups and re-organized due to the sheer diversity they had. That and they were all unicellular, while the monsters are multicellular. But it’s a very long stretch to get there from the pseudoscience of the movie.
Symbolism
There’s not much on the surface of these goofy looking critters. They exist as a radiation fear in only the most superficial of means, and the constant reference to them being ‘zombies’ in the Voodoo sense falls flat on its face if you know anything about Voodun or, well, zombies in any modern sense. That leaves only the subconscious and unintentional symbolism. That subconscious and modernized symbolism can be summed up with a comment Mike Nelson made when watching the movie:
“You think a lot of guys who make movies have issues with women?”
The monsters almost exclusively attack women, when the attacks are shown. There’s even a scene where the monsters attack a slumber party, killing all the “teenagers” there.
Mike: “They don’t even know what panties are, yet they feel compelled to raid.”
Crow: “Every male of any species has the biological urge to panty raid.”
The attacks are violent, have rather bloody aftermaths for 1964, and involve far too much groping than they should. This leads me a rather disgusting conclusion, paralleling the monsters to a gang of murderous rapists.
The general ineffectualness of every hero aside from Eulabelle (a “Mammi” stereotype straight out of a Civil War novel who does damn near everything and motivates everyone to act) can, be in a modern context, be seen as the cultural laxness when it comes to the rights of the victims when compared to today. Not that we’ve solved all the problems regarding rape’s perception, the protection of the victims’ rights, and displays in popular culture, just that we’re not as bad as we were.
I hope.
From there, you could get all Freudian with the pickles in the monsters’ mouths and simultaneously cause me to vomit as we go from an inept movie to an unintentionally creepy and inept movie. I’d call it misogynistic too, but Eulabelle has the competence of the entire cast in her matronly apron, thankfully negating that angle at least in part.
Eulabelle is the hero the movie doesn’t deserve, but I’m glad to have her.
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