More sitcom-style Beach musical hi-jinks with Frankie and Annette. It’s about fifteen minutes too long, but Frankie brings the comedy playing two parts here (his usual sharp-tongued surfer and an obnoxious mop-topped British pop star named Potato Bug), Annette is still cute as they come with breasts that test the limits of the CinemaScope screen, and the plot and jokes are still dumb enough to kill roughly seven million brain cells. Here, the kids’ big problem for the summer is snooty millionaire newspaper publisher Keenan Wynn. He’s had enough of all the sex-crazed teens hanging out by the surf all day so he goes on a newspaper campaign to get the beach closed down so he can build a nursing home there. Meanwhile, Frankie and Annette are fighting again, of course.
It sounds wildly improbable, but director William Asher says that the Beatles were originally going to be in this one. However, by the time the film went into production, the Beatles had become the biggest stars in music and American-International Pictures couldn’t afford them anymore.