The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966)

Family members and crooked opportunists gather at a spooky old mansion for the reading of Boris Karloff’s will at midnight. Sounds like a good excuse for a dance party by the swimming pool to me! There’s plenty of room in the skimpy script for Nancy Sinatra, The Bobby Fuller Four and a guy in an ape costume, too. This movie was the last gasp of American-International Pictures’ swingin’-hips bikini-girl comedies. The drive-in crowds saved a couple brain cells and didn’t turn out for this one. Frankie and Annette got lucky and didn’t have to be in this flop, but Harvey Lembeck was roped in to reprise his bumbling biker role, Eric Von Zipper. Also, featured are Basil Rathbone cashing a paycheck as the villain, Boris Karloff doing some light-lifting as a ghost who watches the action from afar from a comfy chair in his tomb, bombshell Susan Hart (and decades-younger wife of AIP head James H. Nicholson) in a blonde beehive wig, Italian pop singer also-ran Piccola Pupa as herself and about two laughs.