Stephanie Rothman

(On Cable TV, January 2021) The Beach Party movie subgenre is one of the most charming things to ever come out of 1960s Hollywood, and while It’s a Bikini World is a cheap late entrant to the canon, it does have a few distinctions to offer. The first is that the film was co-written and directed by a woman, Stephanie Rothman—a rarity at the time, and one that can be felt in female characters with more agency than was the norm in the subgenre. The second is that the plot offers an amusing inversion of a familiar plot template—as a jock disguises himself as his fictional nerdy twin brother in an attempt to woo his newest crush. It’s not much on which to build an entire film, so It’s a Bikini World double down on surfing, racing, music interludes and other aspects of the formula. It’s a film that was distributed but not produced by the mainline Beach Party studio, so a lot of it feels like a pale imitation of the Avalon/Funicello films. It’s really not very good on its own terms (aside from low-budget production values, the dialogue is terrible, the plotting is just thrown together and there’s little flow from one moment to another), but if you’re feeling the pseudo-nostalgic longing for another entry in that distinctively 1960s subgenre, It’s a Bikini World can certainly fit that specific longing.