Beatniks Zelda, Bird, and Theo show the movies that must be shown every Saturday night at Midnight after “Svengoolie!”
For the Memorial Day holiday weekend, the unofficial kick off of summer, we present the campy “Horror of Party Beach!”
The Horror of Party Beach is a 1964 American horror film in the beach party genre, directed by B-movie maven Del Tenney, which Tenney himself described as “a take-off on beach parties and musicals”.
The Horror of Party Beach is considered to be one of the worst films of all time.
Plot
At a small East Coast beach town, a boat dumps radioactive toxic waste into the ocean, which lands on a sunken ship and the skeletons of shipwrecked dead sailors. The skeletons and water plants are mutated by the waste, transforming into half-human, half-fish monsters that make their way to the surface.
The music is from the Del-Aire’s!
The film’s working title was Invasion of the Zombies. Unlike the beach party movies filmed up to that time, this film was shot in black and white and on the Atlantic coast. Produced in Stamford, Connecticut, the beach scenes were filmed in an area of town called Shippan Point, and shot over a period of three weeks. The biker gang in the film was played by the Charter Oak Motorcycle Club of Riverside, Connecticut.
The monsters for the film were constructed at Gutzon Borglum‘s sculpting studio in Stamford. There were two monster suits, and when they dried, one was too small for the stuntman. Production assistant Ruth Glassenberg Freedman had a son, Charles Freedman, who was 16 at the time. He fit perfectly into the suit and thus portrayed a monster in the film.[1]
The “underwater” transformation scene of the monsters was actually shot on a stage with images of fish in an aquarium superimposed over the dissolving stage shots. Chocolate syrup was used for blood during the monster attack scenes.
