“Well, sheriff, it’s not the claw print of any fish in this area.”

Drake’s rating: Just think, this was made a mere decade before Jaws

Drake’s review: Jon Hall had quite the Hollywood career. Starting off in bit parts and supporting roles in the 1930s, by the ‘40s he was a leading man and in the ‘50s he was the star of the “Ramar of the Jungle” TV series. Never an especially talented actor, he nevertheless got by on his looks and his ability to play fairly straight-forward heroic roles in costume features such as Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and Kit Carson.

Hall also got into a brawl with band leader and mean drunk Tommy Dorsey in 1944, which ended badly for Hall after a mobster associate of Dorsey’s intervened. No, that has nothing to do with The Beach Girls and the Monster, but “The Battle of the Balcony” is just too weird not to mention.

In any event, by the ‘60s Hall’s roles had dried up and he was, willingly or not, semi-retired from the movie industry. He was nothing if not industrious, however, and in 1965 Hall grabbed a camera and shot a 65-minute movie that, even six decades later, is renowned for its wooden acting and inexpert direction, rivaling even the many cinematic misfires in the Ed Wood filmography for its sheer terribleness.

Shot in glorious black and white, The Beach Girls and the Monster tells the story of those teens who were left high and dry after Frankie Avalon hung up his beach towel. They still hang out at the beach but, lacking Frankie’s dulcet tones they are mere shells of their former selves, dancing now to the music blaring uncertainly from a reel-to-reel player. Which, honestly, is about the worst piece of technology that you can bring to a beach. One grain of sand in the mechanism and that thing’s an expensive paperweight.

Still, they dance on, until one of the girls wanders too far from the safety of the crowd and is strangled by a seaweed-covered monster so embarrassed to be in this movie that it wears a rubber mask that came from the discount aisle of the local Five & Dime. The police take a plaster casting of the monster’s tracks to local scientist Dr. Otto Lindsay (Hall). The doctor immediately tells the cops about the dangerous and completely fictional “Fantigua fish” that can weigh up to 100 pounds and walk on land.

Well, yeah, he’s obviously covering something up. I mean, c’mon. He’s spinning a yarn about a gigantic imaginary fish that can walk on land. Even the actors playing the policemen look abashed by the notion.

Meanwhile, Mark the sculptor, who’s living with Dr. Lindsay because there’s no budget to rent out more than one interior for this movie, is making clay sculptures of the girls. He just finished one of Bunny, the girl not-so-coincidentally killed by the monster, giving us Suspect #2 (if we count the Doc as Suspect #1, and I definitely do). Mark also has eyes for the Doc’s wife, Vicky, because this movie needs a melodramatic sub-plot like I need another mason jar full of glowing toxic waste. Meaning, it doesn’t and I don’t, so please stop sending them to me.

Mark puts an even bigger spotlight on himself when Vicky comes on to him and then disdainfully rebuffs him seconds later. Enraged, Mark responds by violently defacing her bust. No, that wasn’t a euphemism, he destroys the clay bust of Vicky that he’d been sculpting. Clean your minds up, people!

Eventually, after stock footage of surfers on a completely different beach, an inept police investigation, a few more monster attacks and yet even more dancing to music that sounds like it was performed by the third runner-up in a Dick Dale soundalike contest, the movie comes to an end with a car chase, of all things. Now I’d love to tell you that the monster jumped behind the wheel and, like Michael Myers, inexplicably knew how to drive, but that’s not exactly the case.

Which is a real pity, as a sequel in which the monster got hooked up in the local racing scene would have been pure money.

Intermission!

• Man, I’d forgotten what those old longboards looked like. You could build a skyscraper from those.
• Music by Frank Sinatra, Jr. There was a Frank Sinatra, Jr.?
• She put sand on his hot dog! No, that wasn’t a euphemism, either. Our minds are still in the gutter, I see.
• That swimming cap is hilarious. It looks like she’s wearing half of a pine cone on her head.
• More girls dancing on the beach. Did this spontaneously happen in the ‘60s?
• He’s escaping in an MG? Just wait for an oil gasket to blow. He’ll be easy to catch.