Psycho Beach Party

Psycho Beach Party is the kind of movie that will elicit a ton of different opinions, and all of them are valid. It is both an homage to and a satire of 60's beach party movies, slasher movies, murder mysteries, and Hitchcockian psychological thrillers, filtered through a psuedo-John Waters style. It is also a satire of Boomer nostalgia for the "good ol' days" and the conservative "family values" mindset. Psycho Beach Party, in short, is juggling a lot of plates. How much you enjoy the movie will largely, if not wholly, depend on how much you vibe with its many aspects and how they gel together. From reading other reviews, there are a lot of people who can't get past the acting, or the relentless weirdness, or the too-many-ideas-at-once shotgun approach of the movie, and there are just as many who love it for those same aspects. I get both sides. I lie somewhere in the middle, leaning more towards the positive, but still finding as many good as bad aspects. What works for me is how well the movie replicates the tone of a beach party movie. The acting is absolutely corny, with everybody having an aw-gee-shucks broadness to them, even when they;'re saying dialogue that would cause Annette Funicello's heart to explode in horror. But that acting is part of the fun of the movie. It's supposed to be arch and over the top, to contrast with the world that could not be further from the starched-lily-white purity of beach movies, and I love that contrast. The cast is so game and playing everything to the hilt, from Lauren Ambrose's delightful turn as the tomboy lead who also has multiple personalities (including a dominatrix and a bizarrely out-of-time sassy trailer park queen), Thomas Gibson playing a rhyming surfer guru, Nicholas Brendon playing an over-sharing intellectual surfer dude who is tired of being perfect and just wants to have some flaws, and Kathleen Robertson as the vicious, unrepentant popular bitch who is also confined to a wheelchair for reasons never explored. Every actor steps on the gas here, and I appreciate that. I also appreciate how, given the movie's genre and intentions, it needs to have a non-stop flow of energy, and it never flags. Just like the acting, PSB bombards the viewer with wild ideas and a never-ending stream of gags and WTF moments. You might be offended by Psycho Beach Party. You might be amused by it. But you will never be bored. Where I think Psycho Beach Party drops the ball is in its satire, specifically that it never goes as far as it should. The concept is sound, and it definitely tweaks the nose of what it's aiming at, but it does so a little too lightly. This has all the bite of a Mad Magazine movie parody or a Weird Al song. Don't get me wrong, those can be quite funny, but when the intention is to skewer the rose-colored nostalgia of the era, Psycho Beach Party settles for a light jab. The slasher aspect is as soft as a pillow, and while the contrast of the antiseptic beach party atmosphere against explicit discussions of sex acts or copious use of the F-word are fun, they just don't go far enough. For a movie that is liberally borrowing from John Waters' style, it seems hesitant to go for the jugular as Waters is unafraid to do. There is a version of this in another timeline that willing to cut right to the bone. The version that we got is a paper cut; it still stings, but it could be so much more. There's also the ending, a confused cluster of bad ideas and worse execution that feels like they didn't know how to end it. Literally, you could stop this movie with 60 seconds left and it'd be so much better. That ending is a true kick in the crotch. I can't say I'd recommend Psycho Beach Party to everybody, because this is just not that kind of movie. Not everybody will even be interested, let alone check it out, let alone get all the way through it. You have to have a certain sense of humor and view on the world to be down with this, and even then, your mileage is gonna vary depending on what you want out of it. I enjoyed it, albeit with some reservations. I don't know that I'll ever come back to it, but I'm glad I stumbled on it, which is how I think most people should find it. It was made to be that kind of movie.