Released: January 23, 2000 (Sundance Film Festival)
Director: Robert Lee King
*****
A tongue-in-cheek send up of vastly different genres (beach blanket films, romances, thrillers), Psycho Beach Party relies primarily on the audience's familiarity with those types of films to bring its humor across. A few sparse moments of out and out comedy are present, such as Charles Busch playing a female detective, but they are few and far between for most audience's taste. The best way to describe it? High camp.
At a drive in theater, a teenager is killed. The entire beach side town is on alert. Teenage Florence (Lauren Ambrose, perhaps the best thing the film has going for it) doesn't care: she makes her way to the ocean with an uglier friend...and a "better looking" one. There, her interest in surfing is rebuffed by, quite obviously, good looking guys. She lands on the doorstep of surfing legend Kanaka (Thomas Gibson), who teaches her to ride the waves, thus bringing her into the exclusive circle. But a dangerous secret lurks in her subconscious, transforming Florence into a psycho...
Alright, this isn't the deepest of films nor does it say anything-really-about life or the world. Honestly, it's not even that funny, once you get past Busch in drag or see Florence change once or twice. The entire endeavor looks as good-complete with laughingly fake (and intentionally so)-as the cast does, yet it's also that superficial. I guess it's the intent: to create a movie from the best parts of the genres it pays homage to. None of those early films, not the Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello pictures or many of the later thrillers wanted to do anything besides entertain. The issue here is the proceedings are quite dull while it tries to entertain.
The plot doesn't hold up to much scrutiny, not that it should, based on the source material. Incompetent police work, a town populated by the same dozen people, red herrings around every corner, a "surprise" confession...like Busch's Die, Mommie, Die we're supposed to laugh at the homage, enjoy what is on the screen and then immediately dispose of it. This is, more than anything else, for the fans of films from the 1950s and 1960s, those who can relate each little touch on screen. (Back to Ambrose for a second: she plays young and naive as well as anyone, flipping into an alternate personae in a split second. Coming before her work in Six Feet Under, this is a more demanding role, if only because she carries the entire story. If her performance, and the changeover to Ann, does not draw your attention, the movie is sunk. Fortunately, she is a wonderfully magnetic presence stuck in an average production.)