It’s slow, but there’s a luminous beatnik aura here that makes it worth seeing. The reason is director Curtis Harrington, who made avant garde shorts and worked with Kenneth Anger before he made this story of what happens when a good-hearted sailor-on-leave (Dennis Hopper, young and innocent) falls in love with a gloomy brunette (Linda Lawson) whose last two boyfriends died in strange drowning accidents. There’s also a rumor going around the beach town that she’s a mythical mermaid. Whatever. This played the drive-ins, but Harrington directs with his heart in the arthouse. He uses his low budget the same way that the neorealists did. The raw settings are strokes of authenticity rather than failures of filmmaking. Harrington doesn’t hide the grime. In fact, he often holds his camera at a distance from the characters so we can see their trashed-out, smokey world. A few scenes are even documentary-like views of an ocean-side tourist trap. The constant, haunting sound of the surf in the background further lets us know that we’re in the hands of a filmmaker who gives a damn.