Horror at Party Beach from 1963 bills itself as The first horror monster musical! It is a genre it clearly perfected since no one has attempted to mush together the beach movie, the monster movie, and the musical since. I wonder if there are other genres we could mash together with musicals. The cop drama perhaps? 

The movie opens in the convertible of a party beach-bound couple, she’s drinking and verbally abusing her boyfriend. So this sets a good precident for the rest of the movie. 

We’re then treated to a boat dumping barrels of nuclear waste into the ocean, so this is going to be a cheerful movie but at least we got the environmental message out of the way early. We’re then get to watch a long drawn out two-and-a-half minute sequence of the nuclear waste leaking  into the water and then mutating the random human skull on the ocean floor into something I can only describe as the mascot costume for the local high school’s Fightin Evil Axolotols but with Googly Eyes. How does a skull mutate on its own? I don’t know. How does it grow arms, legs, and a torso? I don’t know. Why was there a human skull randomly on the ocean floor? I don’t know, New Jersey I suppose? 

Do you ever find it annoying in musicals when dance numbers break out and everyone suddenly knows all the moves? Well, that’s not a problem in this movie, because the party beachgoers only kind of know the movies, and are in no way in sync with each other. I’m pretty sure one guy skipped rehearsals together. But the local motorcycle gang shows up to put an end to the lack of choreography. Our abusive alcoholic is making goo-goo eyes at the leader of the pack. Then she starts dancing with him, while the boyfriend goes off and flirts with some other girl. Either break up or go to couples counseling already. 

Our second musical number starts and it’s called the wiggle wobble. If you can imagine a dance move inspired by trying to shake a large dingleberry loose from between your butt cheeks, then you can imagine the wiggle wobble. Also, this movie claims to be a musical, but really they just have a band playing in several scenes and people dancing to it. I think musical is a bit of a stretch but whatever. This is more of a movie with music in it. 

So the boyfriend, Hank, and the leader of the pack start to rumble and drag their respective gangs into it, and the fight does resemble a tussle between the Jets and the Sharks in choreography, it’s just a shame the music stopped. They’re forcibly pulled apart and can’t want a single moment to shake hands and make up. Drunky Smurf is so upset by this turn of events she immediately strips off her clothes and goes for a swim. 

 Meanwhile, on party beach, our party goers are dancing to the Zombie Stomp and I can’t help but feel like the lyrics should be coming with a spoiler alert.  Buuuuuuut Alcoholic Annie gets eaten by the horror of party beach during the Zombie Stomp and now the Police are investigating, sort of. 

So the next day, the girl Hank was flirting with, who didn’t die decides that she doesn’t want to attend this 20-girl slumber party because she’s too depressed after the funeral. But the girls at the slumber party are doing slumber party-type things like pranks, brushing each other's hair, pillow fighting, and playing guitar and singing songs, which I feel also is cheating on the definition of musical. But oh noes, not one but two giant evil axolotls attack the girls and, in the immortal words of Metallica, kill ‘em all.

We then cut to three random young girls driving in a convertible and they’re discussing how they positively will not stop in this town because of all the monster murders in the news that occured there. So then they of course immediately and without hesitation, decide to stop to get gas in this town with all these monster murders they heard about in the news. The girl in the back seat flirts with the full-service attendant by pulling up her skirt and showing off a bit of her calves, and he thanks her by giving them crappy directions to New York City and telling them to try the picante sauce. They get lost, get a flat tire, and … oh just hurry up and murder them already. 

Two of the girls get carried away by the monsters the other one gets locked in the trunk of the car. I hope Chuck Berry’s cousin Marvin can spring her out the next morning. 

Hank and his new girlfriend go for a drive and when she questions why they ended up at party beach. he answers her that he just has a funny feeling about this place. I mean I’d have a funny feeling about a place if my girlfriend was murdered there by a budget high school mascot less than a week ago. Yes, she was an abusive alcoholic, but at least pretend to mourn a little and maybe wait a month before going steady with someone new? 

Oh goodie, we’re back to being an air-quotes musical again. Everyone's slow dancing and necking to another song by the same four-piece rock band, which begs the question, where is the flute music coming from!?! Is that the monster's mating call? Or are these some Jethro Tull wannnabes? 

With prom just around the corner, our comically not scary monsters try to steal a dress from the local Sears and Robuck by smashing a window, but accidentally cuts its arm off in the process. A  scientist studies this arm and determines it’s human but all the cells in the body have been replaced with protozoa, thus making them have to feast on human blood. Did they even know how to science in the 1960’s? Or remember to look a few pages back in the script to remember we already saw how these monsters were created, and it wasn’t like that? Also this somehow makes them zombies, if you were confused why the Zombie Stomp song was our “we’re singing the plot” song. Maybe the writers decided this made them zombies because the song was already paid for and the costumes were already made, and just make it works somehow.

There’s a happy little accident, this crappy scientist, and father to Hank’s new best gal, has a beaker of sodium just sitting around and it accidentally gets spilled on the Fightin’ Axolotol’s severed arm … fin. . . . protozoa club thing and it bursts into flames, and now we know how to kill the monsters zombie fish things. This might be a climactic point in the movie if they had tried to kill them in anyway shape or form before instead of just screaming and dying. Literally no one even threw a punch, and we’re just skipping ahead to throwing sodium on them. Cool. 

Two town drunks stumble upon two dead bodies before becoming mutated fish food themselves. Now, I have to ask, if the protozoa monsters drink the blood of a drunk, do they get drunk too? 

Welcome to the montage of people getting eaten by monsters overlain with the police hard at work filing papers. Oh and now these fish zombie mascots are radioactive too. So now we’re testing every body of water for radioactivity to track down the monsters. Which came from the sea. Which I’m fairly certain contains salt water, And I’m pretty sure salt contains sodium. But what the hell do I know? I’m not a scientician. 

Hank goes to New York, while his new alive girlfriend goes to the quarry. When her father, the scientist finds out where she went, he the fuck freaks out as that was the most logical place for the zombie protozoa things to be hiding and didn’t need any science to figure that out. As Dad and Hank rush to save her, uh oh, she fall down go boom. Suddenly without warning, it’s the middle of the night. Then it’s evening again. Then night again as Dad tries to save his daughter. Hank and the police show up just in time to start throwing handfuls of sodium at the monsters and watching them all explode. When they get back to the cars it’s evening again. 

Then it’s morning, the next morning in fact, after Hank comes a knock knock knockin on his girlfriend’s door, the maid lets Hank into the house and directly into his new girlfriend's bedroom where she's sleeping, which isn’t creepy at all. The announcer on the radio announces “The invasion of the sea zombies is over.” Oh, so that’s the description we’re going with now. That just makes them sound like you’re censoring yourself but trying to call them Cunt zombies. 

And everyone lives happlily ever after, yadda yadda Pfffft. 

Horror at Party Beach is available streaming on  Plex