The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini
Director: Don Weis
Year: 1966
Rating: 5.5
This is one of the last AIP Beach movies except
it has no beach nor Annette nor Frankie, but it does have lots of beautiful
girls in bikinis doing the Frug to some twisting music. In a haunted house.
Yes, it is pretty awful, but I love the fact that films like this were once
being produced and shown in theaters and that people bought tickets. A different
age to what we have today. Among the idiocy of running around, the chaos,
ghosts, a man in an ape costume, there are actually a few decent gags that
are worth a chortle. But it is mainly the music, the girls and the cast that
kept me going. What a cast. Perhaps past their expiration date, but still
very neat. Boris Karloff as a corpse, Basil Rathbone as a shyster lawyer,
Patsy Kelley who was a comedy star in the 1930s and Francis X Bushman who
was a big star during the silent era. They had signed Buster Keaton who had
appeared in a few of the Beach movies but he had to bow out due to illness
and was to die soon afterwards. This film is considered jinxed. Some seven
people involved with it died within a short period of time.
Those are the oldies - among the young people
were Tommy Kirk, a Disney star until it was discovered that he was gay, Quinn
O'Hara, a stunning redhead, Harvey Lembeck who once again plays Eric Von
Zipper and Nancy Sinatra - which was the main reason I was here. I have a
thing for Nancy. Playing the ghost is Susan Hart who was married at the time
to James H. Nicholson, one of the founders of AIP. She got into a few of
the other Beach films as well. When he passed away in 1972, she became the
rights owner of eleven films, none that you have likely ever heard of except
perhaps I Was a Teenage Werewolf.
To be clear, the ghost is invisible, not
the bikini. It begins with Hart approaching a crypt dressed like Little Red
Riding Hood. No wolf here - just Boris Karloff in his casket. She opens it
and wakes him up - to his surprise he is dead - just recently - and she says
that for him to go to heaven, he has to perform one good deed and she will
help him - but he can't leave the crypt - for good reason as I will mention
in a moment. He has three heirs coming for a reading of the will and he knows
that the lawyer (Rathbone) plans to kill them. His good deed will be to save
them. Rathbone brings in a few killers to do the job. Also showing up are
a busload of teenagers (all way too old) who are there to party.
And Von Zipper and his motorcycle gang also
get in on the act. Rathbone invites his daughter (O' Hara) to the soiree
to kill the nephew of one of the heirs. And the gorilla of course. The amazing
thing about the film is that the Karloff and Hart characters were added on
after the film was finished and AIP thought it needed more punch. Karloff
stays in the crypt the whole time while Hart is superimposed from time to
time on the screen. And it kind of works. Probably a day's work for Boris,
but he is great.
The music comes with two songs by the Bobby
Fuller group (I Fought the Law and the Law Won), one song from O'Hara that
nearly melts the screen, a song by Piccola Pupa, a thirteen year old Italian
phenom who made it on to the Ed Sullivan Show and sadly only one song from
Nancy - but she is around for most of the film clad in a bikini. This is
pure nostalgia for an old guy like me. I can't recall if I ever saw any of
these Beach films in the theater, but everyone knew Annette and Frankie.
Lots of silliness ahead. Among the soon to die were Rathbone, Bushman and
Fuller (in a very mysterious death).
