Anette Funicello

  • Pajama Party (1964)

    Pajama Party (1964)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) The Beach Party series is wild from beginning to end, so noting that fourth entry Pajama Party is only loosely related to the previous three, that it welcomes Buster Keaton to the series (playing a Native Indian stereotype, alas) and that it features an extraterrestrial invader who falls in love with a beach girl is really just par for the course. The leather-clad bikers are back, and so are Anette Funicello (in a leading role) and Frankie Avalon (in a distant supporting one). Bobbi Shaw plays a one-joke “ya-ya” Swedish bombshell, Dorothy Lamour pops up as a ghost of teenage musical comedies past, the popularity of the series clearly steers it toward a more deliberate approach, and throughout it all you can see the formalization of 1960s teenage culture. The humour in Pajama Party is now silly and quaint, but not necessarily terrible — it’s kind of fun to hang out on the beach with teenagers with the period fashions and music and without big problems. (Well, other than an impending alien invasion, although that’s dealt with fairly innocuously.) The Beach Party films are a package deal anyway — like one of them and there’s a chance you’ll like the others, but they’re best not consumed in rapid succession.

  • Muscle Beach Party (1964)

    Muscle Beach Party (1964)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) What may be insufferable juvenilia to a generation may be a cultural artifact half a century later, and if contemporary reviews for Muscle Beach Party weren’t kind, I suspect that more modern takes on the film will revel in the mid-1960s California beach atmosphere. The second of the “Beach Party” series with Anette Funicello and Frankie Avalon, this sequel brings together the burgeoning surfer and bodybuilding cultures together in a comic setting, with an added dash of romantic spice as an Italian countess distracts Avalon from Funicello’s affections. Add some bouncy music (by the Beach Boys, the Del Tones and an insanely young Stevie Wonder), a late-movie cameo by Peter Lorre (with the film having the decency to literally stop in mid-frame as he makes an entrance) and you’ve got enough here for any sixties pop-culture enthusiast. Don Rickles and Buddy Hackett provide additional comedy. It’s all set against the then-newish concept of the “the teenager,” with California showing the way to the rest of the nation. Muscle Beach Party is really not sophisticated entertainment, but it is sunny fun and it’s now almost perfect as a time capsule of its time.