cult film freak: DEFENDING THE INFFAMOUS CAMP OF 'THE HORROR OF PARTY BEACH'

Title: THE HORROR OF BLOOD BEACH Year: 1964 Camp Value: ***1/2

Starting out one of those town-crashing 1960's biker flicks, quickly transforming into a WEST SIDE STORY rumble before blasting into a BEACH BLANKET BINGO musical, the camp-driven drive-in HORROR AT PARTY BEACH has flirtatious brunette Marilyn Clarke causing good guy local John Lyon and angry biker Agustin Mayor to fight...

She's like Janet Leigh from PSYCHO, seeming like the main character before foreshadowing Crissie Watkins in JAWS, quickly murdered in the water (actually a rocky atoll) by one of the goofiest looking monster-costume-antagonists ever...

Gorgeously energetic mystery girl in white bikini from THE HORROR OF PARTY BEACH

Which makes low-low-budget director Del Tenny's PARTY BEACH so deliciously awful, and downright bizarre... while the girl's being slaughtered by the radioactive menace, we cut back and forth to garage band The Del-Aires playing jovial reverb-rock to dancing beach kids, including a nameless energetic white-bikini-clad beauty that the director obviously dug, and who should have been leading man John Lyon's ingenue-girlfriend...

Instead, adding to the overall creepy mystique, his smooching love-interest's played by real-life sister Alice Lyon... yet neither have very much screen-time compared to what actually kind of works here: like the grisly massacre of about twenty-teenage folk-singing girls by a horde of blood-sucking creatures... that might look silly but sure mean business...

Dead Girl's Party from HORROR OF PARTY BEACH

The one actor who would actually have a post-PARTY BEACH career plays one of two town drunks, and Wayne Tippit's murder, along with three obnoxious yentas on a noisy road trip, continues the kind of slasher-genre murders that would be common one decade later...

Including the usual group of old-school science-minded do-gooders trying to figure out how to kill the monsters (featuring scene-stealer Eulabelle Moore as a voodoo-studied maid) that are the most formidably suspenseful during traipsing night scenes — where their actions override the infamous aesthetic.