Double Feature Drive-In: Horror of Party Beach & I Was A Teenage Werewolf
"There's a monster loose on the beach! Let's dance!", "Teenage high school rampage!"
There are people reading this who have never been to a drive-in.
They have never had a corn dog watching a movie, snuck friends in by placing them in the trunk of their car, snuck in beer or watched a movie in the pouring rain with the windshield wipers going. They never got a hickie in the backseat.
You are in luck. Here’s 2 great drive-in movies. How does a film become a great drive-in movie? By having a very simple plot, great action and hot girls. That’s pretty much it. No one needs to know you got your hickie on the couch, not in the car!
From Wikipedia: The Horror of Party Beach was directed by Del Tenney. His career began as an actor, working at the Los Angeles State College, appearing as an extra in films such as Stalag 17 and The Wild One. After moving to New York to act professionally, he worked as an assistant director in exploitation films, including Satan in High Heels. Tenney was approached by producer Alan Iselin, whose family owned drive-in theaters in Albany, New York, to make a double feature for drive-ins. He offered to put up $50,000 and come up with the titles and pressbooks if Tenney would also contribute $50,000. The titles Iselin created were The Curse of the Living Corpse and Invasion of the Zombies. The original scripts for both films were written by Tenney and his wife Margot Hartman. Unlike most beach party movies filmed to that time, The Horror of Party Beach was shot in black and white and on the Atlantic coast, with the primary filming site being the Shippan Point area of Stamford, Connecticut. The biker gang in the film was portrayed by the Charter Oak Motorcycle Club (described as being "affiliated with, but...a step beneath, the Hells Angels") of Riverside, Connecticut.
The monster costumes were designed by Bob Verberkmoes, a theater set designer, and constructed at Gutzon Borglum's sculpting studio in Stamford. The costume heads sat atop the actors' heads, such that the actor looked through a hole in the costume neck. Two monster costumes were constructed; upon completion, one was found to be too small for the hired stuntman/actor. Production assistant Ruth Glassenberg Freedman had a 16-year-old son, Charles Freedman, who fit perfectly into the small suit, and he was subsequently recruited to portray a monster(s) in the film. The underwater skeleton transformation scene was shot on a stage, with images of tropical fish in an aquarium later superimposed over the dissolving stage shots. Chocolate syrup was used for blood during the monster attack scenes.
From Wikipedia: Samuel Z. Arkoff wrote in his memoirs that he got a lot of resistance for producing a film portraying a teenager becoming a monster, an idea that had never been exploited in film before.
Dawn Richard, who plays a teenaged gymnast in the film, was a 21-year-old Playboy centerfold model at the time, appearing in the magazine's May 1957 issue, which hit the newsstands a month ahead of the movie.
Pepe, the Romanian janitor at the police station, was played by the Russian-born Vladimir Sokoloff, a character actor who appeared as ethnic types in over 100 productions, his most famous being the old Mexican man in The Magnificent Seven three years later.
Tony Marshall is the only other male actor to receive billing in the trailer for I Was a Teenage Werewolf, in addition to Landon and Bissell; however, he made only one other motion picture, the obscure Rockabilly Baby, for Twentieth Century-Fox, which was released in October of the same year.
Shooting began 13 February 1957. The movie was shot in seven days.
This film was the first of four "teenage monster" movies produced by AIP during 1957 and 1958. All four films highlighting a theme of innocent teenagers being preyed upon, transformed, and used by corrupt adults for selfish interests. I Was a Teenage Frankenstein and Blood of Dracula were both released in November 1957 and feature a teenage boy transformed into a Frankenstein's monster and a teenage girl transformed into a werewolf-like vampire, respectively. How to Make a Monster, released in 1958, features two young actors being hypnotized to kill while in make-up as the monster characters "Teenage Werewolf" and "Teenage Frankenstein" of the 1957 films.
Here is your drive-in experience:
Behind the paywall: MST3K hilarious versions of THE HORROR OF PARTY BEACH and I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF.
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The Chicago Psychotronic Film Society which begat The Global Psychotronic Film Society is quite a party. From it's earliest days with guests JOHN CLEESE, ROBERT DeNIRO, BILL MURRAY (our first dues paid member), DAN AYKROYD, SYDNEY POLLACK, RUSS MEYER, CLIVE BARKER, JOHN DUGAN, PENN AND TELLER, KENNETH ANGER, DARIO ARGENTO and many more there was nothing like it on earth. People travelled from all over the world to attend our parties or host them and none of the celebrities were paid to be at the events.
We did shows at bars and clubs LIMELIGHT, KABOOM, THE LYRIC OPERA (!), THE BIOGRAPH THEATER, THE LIAR'S CLUB and many more places. This meant you had to be 21 to attend and there were no dealer tables.
We were the only fandom that had an equal number of women in the group at a time when women avoided fandom! Join us on Facebook here: The party starts now
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