FILMBRATS - REVIEWS

All Florence wants is to fit in. She sees the cool kids hanging out and laughing and surfing all day long and thinks, why not me? Sure she has a friend, but Berdine is equally geeky, if not more so and that’s just not cutting it anymore. She wants to get out there and ride the waves and get boys to notice her as a sexual object instead of just some twerp. Well, while she’s doing her best to fit in with this crowd, the new circle of friends keep getting killed off. It seems someone in the town has a murderous streak in them. And it just may be Florence. You see, she’s been blacking out a lot lately, and when she does, she becomes a whole new person. Unfortunately, she never remembers who.

Charles Busch (writer, based on his stage play of the same name) presents and acts in this send up of 1960s beach movies. He plays Captain Monica Stark (although he was Florence in the play), a cop determined to track down the vicious killer that she discovers only kills those with deformities. He plays the character the least over the top out of all of them. Now, I know that movies made to be bad are supposed to have bad acting, but for whatever reason, I really didn’t find it effective. Maybe it’s my unfamiliarity with the beach subgenre, but I didn’t find the performances to be funny. Of course, that could also be due to the dialogue.

Some of the lines were clever, but certainly didn’t come close to making me laugh out loud. And, although I appreciate the thought of having a character (Kanaka, played by Thomas Gibson) rhyme his lines, I didn’t enjoy listening to it. It was painful, and not in a “this is good because it’s bad and the movie is making fun of bad movies” way, but rather in a “this is bad because they think that writing their own bad dialogue will pass as being a mockery of bad dialogue” way. But there’s a difference in bad dialogues. One is that the writers create cheesy lines that they attempt to push off as serious, but it fails do to poor writing or acting skills. The other (the kind that’s supposed to be in this movie) is that the writers make their lines obviously inappropriate or incoherent and the decent actors deliver straight, thus giving a knowing wink to the audience. Well, the joke’s on them. It all falls flat. The dialogue is simply bad on its own merits. It needed to be purposefully worse to have a chance of working the way intended.

I really didn’t like the killer story either. Mostly because they try to play it as something of a legitimate murder mystery. I guess they needed to try something to put a little life in the party, but it doesn’t work. Beware of a potential spoiler here, but I doubt it’ll be much of a real shock. I wanted Florence to be the killer. It probably would have been pretty funny to watch her kill the people complete with bad special effects and poorly acted death scenes. That, in my mind, has potential, but instead it turns out to be a typical disappointing cop out. Something needed to be done. Maybe throw in a surfing competition with some stock footage. The long green screen surfing sequences weren’t doing it. Anything to interject a little legitimate excitement or fun would have been appreciated. This barely held my attention the whole way through. Trust me, you don’t want to be invited to this party.

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