Ken Russell's bizzare, vulgar excesses tend to obscure the fact that his movies often have a genuine moral vision -- specifically bemoaning that conventional morality tends to focus on policing the pleasures of the flesh, while ignoring the genuinely dangerous forces looming in the background.
God bless this movie for making that point in the dumbest way possible.
A movie that spends most of its time looking like a kinescope of an old B&W soap opera about an unhappy middle-aged couple, and most of its remaining time on go-go dancers, only occasionally remembering that "beach" and "monster" were advertised in the title, so perhaps the movie should check on them.
Eventually one of the beach teens sings a song with a puppet of a lion. Then there's a geniuinely unexpected ending.
Minor masterpiece of old-style bad movie fun.
What if a kid basically had a pet Pinhead, but — unlike the old suburban fantasy films this movie quotes — the family that adopts the monster is deeply dysfunctional and amoral (in the most lovable way)?
My friend Stuart has a small part in this movie, and I take great comfort knowing that the universe somehow saw fit to let him to be in the most Stuart movie ever.
