Bikini Movies, NOT Beach Movies

Bikini Movies, NOT Beach Movies

Let's take a lingering look at two of my favorite of the AIP bikini movies. Why bikini movies rather than beach movies? Well, no one went to see the beach. I'll start with one of most successful, HOW TO STUFF A WILD BIKINI. (The answer? Start with a tame one first. Ha. Ha.)

Some enthusiasts also call them Frankie and Dee Dee movies, because the stars were always known by these names on screen. So why was Frankie Avalon always referred to by his first name, but Annette Funicello was always called Dee Dee? Hmmm, I can think of two good reasons. (Dee Dee = DD or Double D for the people in the back row.)

These movies were ostensibly comedies, with the majority of the laughs coming from one ERIC VON ZIPPER. He was leader of the world's unlikeliest looking biker gang, known alternately as the Malibu Rat Pack and the Rats & Mice club. Von Zipper and the rest of his middle-aged stooges were the bad guys in all of these movies, but were usually more of a nuisance than a real menace.

One of the jokes behind the scenes was that Harvey Lembeck, who played Von Zipper, was around forty five years old and deathly afraid of motorcycles, so the only time he was ever seen sitting on one was for publicity pictures like below. When his character had to ride, it was either rear projection on a stationary bike, done by an obvious stuntman (usually about forty pounds lighter and twenty years younger), or the “Zipper” rode in a sidecar. Can you imagine Sonny Barger of the Hell’s Angels doing that? Man, only a bitch rides in a sidecar.

I remember watching these movies with my brother (who was a biker) and while I would be lost in a haze of prepubescent horniness over the bikini girls, my brother would be bitterly criticizing Lembeck's obvious lack of riding ability.

Harvey Lembeck was really funny, especially because he was so horrendously miscast, (sometimes casting is all about finding the wrong guy for the role). He also had good people in his gang to work with, but that was hardly the point. No matter how good an actor is, he is always going to lose to the girl in the bikini, and whenever we were with the actors, versus the bikini girls, people would start checking their watches.

In many ways, Von Zipper was the precursor of Fonzie from Happy Days. You've got an actor pretending to be a hood, a guy who really doesn't ride that well pretending to be a biker, and he is surrounded by, but not really part of a group of wholesome clean cut kids. Still, the Fonz was a hell of a lot cooler than Von Zipper could ever hope to be. (The Fonz = the VonZ?)

The “Zipper” was in just about every one of these movies, even more than Avalon and Funicello, so you might say, he deserves to be called the star more than they did. But who are we kidding, the two real stars of the bikini movies were Annette Funicello.

Funicello was still under contract with Disney when the first bikini movies were made. At Disney the joke had been that old Uncle Walt had taken her career well in hand. Thanks to Disney's lawyers she didn't wear a bikini for the first two movies, and her character generally spent most of her screen time trying to get everybody else to cover up and behave themselves. But it's like one of my rules of strip clubs, while the naked dancers are on stage, all the guys will be hitting on the fully clothed waitress.

In many ways, Funicello blazed the trail followed by the likes of the Olsen twins, Britney Spears, and Alyssa Milano. She started out as a child star, and when she started developing, she became the focus of an intense erotic fascination. A lot of teenagers, and a lot of dirty old men too, who had noticed how cute she was on the Mickey Mouse Club, wanted to know in the worst possible way what she looked like without the mouse ears and the sweatshirt.

Annette’s bikini scene became a big event. She wore more clothes than most of the women and a lot of the men in the cast. The producers were coy, keeping Annette's assets under wraps, building the audience's anticipation for the big reveal. This was the real climax of the series, and once all of her was out, her career lost steam. There was nowhere else to go. She could have gotten naked, but Funicello, a very devout person, would have refused, and besides, that would have been a stag film. They tried to build a plot line about Dee Dee and Frankie getting married and having kids, but nobody wants to see that in a bikini movie. The answer to the problem was to make the movies about the guys, and Funicello gradually became nothing more than window dressing like the rest of the girls. Although she is the star of Wild Bikini, when Dobie Gillis shows up she is on her way out. By the time of Dr Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine she was gone. Ironically, once she put on that bikini, she was done in bikini movies.

While Annette may have been demure and modest, the rest of the girls were letting it all hang out. Before these movies, the American public had probably never seen so much female flesh at one time on a movie screen. Oh sure, you'd see a lot of leg in a musical number, but this was generally considered extra gravy. The audience was supposed to look beyond the thrill of the exposed limbs to the true beauty of the movements they made (nudge, nudge --- wink, wink).

However, the main point of the frequent production numbers in the bikini movies was never how well the girls danced or how great the choreography was. Nobody was expecting Busby Berkely in Beach Blanket Bingo. Another one of my observations about strip clubs that seems appropriate here is that nobody ever complains that the stripper can't keep a beat.

The movies were stuffed like, well, a bikini, with young starlets in swimsuits from beginning to end. There wasn't any nudity, of course. Generally there wasn't even the suggestion of sex or drugs (you had to go see French movies for that kind of stuff). You could show them at church today. Any children in the audience will just be bored (I know I was, until I hit puberty.) But they are the ancestors to the eighties teen comedies, like Hardbodies and One Crazy Summer where there was plenty of sex, drugs and nudity which helped the audience to get over the lame comedy and awful acting. The genre was ultimately killed by the remote control, which made the comedy scenes superfluous, and only survives now as ironic Yuppie nostalgia like Wet Hot American Summer with Janeane Garofalo. (The sex comedy still survives.)

Dr Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine featured Vincent Price. I remember this fondly. Frankie Avalon and Dwayne Hickman (the star of Dobie Gillis) were paired up to be the Hope and Crosby of the Sixties, I guess. Neither one of them has a chance against Price, and not even Vincent Price can command the screen when there are bikini girls running around. A true classic of American cinematic cheese, there was also a sequel, Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs. These aren't considered beach movies, because they don't feature Funicello and they don't have beach in the title, but they are very definitely bikini movies. Vincent Price and bikini girls? Now that's entertainment.

A constant in all bikini movies was the presence of a respected actor. Generally someone whose career was maybe fading a bit, someone who had a mortgage payment to make, someone who didn't mind coming to the AIP back lot to ogle some bikini girls from behind their huge Sixties style sunglasses. They usually played a second villain of some sort. Mickey Rooney, Brian Donleavy, and Buster Keaton are all in Wild Bikini. On one hand, you were grateful for these guys for appearing and trying to liven things up, because most of the cast were not chosen for their acting ability. On the other hand, the acting was getting in the way of the girls in the bikinis.

Almost all of these guys seemed like creeps when I was younger. They're still creeps now, but I'm more understanding today. When I go to the beach and find myself surrounded by jiggling female flesh packed into a few slight strips of rayon polyester blend, but these girls are young enough to be my daughters . . . Well, now that I'm older, I can understand better at how the mind of a middle-aged man kind of strips its gears. But there is no getting away from the fact that the guys who made these movies were creeps.

Obviously made by middle-aged men, the point of view they espouse is middle-aged and dirty minded. Only middle aged men and bikini girls populate bikini movies. (Avalon was only twenty six, but the blow dried hair made him seem older). There is no suggestion of a Sexual Revolution going on. All Dee Dee wanted was a cozy little home with Frankie while he ran around and flirted with the other bikini girls. However, if she so much as said 'Hi' to another man, he would go crazy. No one on screen seemed to be enjoying the sexual liberation of the Swingin' Sixties.

Of course bikini movies weren't hip even when they were new. There are no hippies, no authentic bikers or surfers anywhere to be seen. Frankie Avalon even wears a Navy uniform in Wild Bikini. The only people who seemed to be counter culture in any way were Von Zipper and the Rats and Mice Club, and they were the bad guys.

The bikini movies are awful, especially if you are not viewing them through the haze of nostalgia. With the amount of skin available on Internet and cable, there is no reason for the average pervert to watch them. However they are an ingrained memory of mine thanks to growing up in the seventies, when there were three channels and only rich people had remote controls. None of them are over ninety minutes long, so you generally sat there and watched. And, there were girls in bikinis in it.

Today they're probably of more interest to rock and pop fans. Stevie Wonder, Dick Dale and the DelTones, Nancy Sinatra, the Kingsmen, they all appeared in bikini movies, although the rest of the music is mostly prefab dreck.

The real point of these movies were to advertise the music, making them also the ancestors of MTV. Frankie Avalon was one of the Teen Idols of the era, a packaged commodity manufactured by producers in Philadelphia and New York City. He would sing one or two of his new CRAP singles in every movie, which stopped the film dead like those Harpo Marx harp recitals would kill Marx Brothers movies. The only way most men could stay interested is that there were girls in bikinis dancing. They also went out of their way to make fun of British rock bands (Avalon caricatures John Lennon under the name of Potato Bug). Avalon's resentment of the Beatles and the British Invasion makes more sense when you realize that they were driving him and the rest of his prefab brotherhood off the record charts at that time.

Even though they were set and made in California, they were really East Coast kind of movies. I think the chance of seeing the likes of Frankie and Dee Dee and Eric Von Zipper at the beach was much more likely on Long Island than Los Angeles. Even the way they behaved was more East Coast conventional than West Coast hip. Dee Dee sexually blackmailed Frankie into settling down and marrying her, with the implicit understanding that he was going to be fooling around on the side.

Still, I found these movies charming when I was a kid. Nowadays, I don't think I'd like the people in it that much. I don't know if I'm more discerning or just more irritable. The idea of people hanging out at the beach, but never getting their hair wet and never mussing up their makeup kind of creeps me out. But I am obviously thinking too much. Another production number with some dancing bikini girls will help me clear my mind.