AIP do a twist on the Beach Party series by sending their equivalent of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby – Frankie Avalon and Dwayne Hickman – out to the snow. Frankie and Dwayne are two sexually frustrated college students who can’t get any action, even though it’s midway through the 60s. So when they go on a ski trip, they get into drag and try to find out what makes women tick – and naturally the class stud (Aron Kincaid) falls in love with Hickman.
The ski setting works well – it’s still an environment where kids can muck around, sing, dance and romance; the snow visuals are fresh; there’s still a pool enabling us to see some bikini action (and they wind up at the beach at the end, anyway –Walley’s bikini top almost falls off in the last shot). There are two great musical numbers – Lesley Gore sings “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows” on a bus, and James Brown sings “I Feel Good”… in a winter sweater!
Annette Funicello makes a fun cameo, and the female leads are strong, Deborah Walley and Yvonne Craig. Also good is Bobbi Shaw who is very sweet as the Swede with a yen for Frankie; Eva Six played a sexually aggressive Swede after Frankie in Beach Party, but she was just up for rooting… whereas Shaw plays a very sexually experienced girl who would like a long courtship like American girls enjoy.
Like many cross-dressing movies, the sexual politics are interesting – girls don’t tell boys who to get girls interested in them, Deborah Walley denies girls are competitive with each other, Hickman asks Yvonne Craig “not to be funnier than he is”, girls laugh about tales where they hit boys, the hotel manager starts dressing as a woman, Kincaid is never shown to be really enthusiastic about any woman except Hickman in a dress, Hickman enjoys a romantic evening he spends with Kincaid (a direct rip off of the one in Some Like It Hot, with “I got pinned” instead of “I got engaged).
There’s also a scene where Frankie and Hickman are locked (as women) in the girls’ dorm; Hickman asks what to do next, and Frankie one asks how old their audience is – Hickman says “fifteen” so Frankie points to the window, as if to say “well, we leave the room instead of having sex.” So AIP bite the hand that feeds them. Maybe this slight contempt for the audience explains why the beach party genre soon ran out of steam. (The credits at the end tell the audience to watch out for Cruise Party – presumably Frankie and/or Annette on a cruse ship, had it ever been made.)
Acting students interested in an example of how actors lose focus may be interested in the sequence where Lesley Gore sings “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows” – look how focused Frankie and Dwayne are, but Aron Kincaid drifts in and out of paying attention.
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