If you ever needed proof of the superiority of AIP's Beach Party series, here it is. Lippert couldn't even bring themselves to shoot this in colour, and they certainly couldn't afford stars of the magnitude of Frankie and Annette. The only saving grace of this tiresome take on teenage life in the mid 60s is, not surprisingly, the music. Sonny and Cher appear performing It's Gonna Rain, a garagey b-side that belies their pop leanings. The Astronauts are on hand performing a sub-Elvis number and the film's highlight, Here Comes Speedy Gonzales, and Sandy Nelson pounds out a little teen beat while a rather tuneless (and nameless) band backs him up.
17 Reviews
Ideal Fodder for MST3000 Style Goofing
im-fmouie2 March 2016
OMG! haha. There are no words to adequately describe how really bad this movie is. I gave it a 3 rating only because it's so much darned fun to goof on. The acting is third rate; the story is second rate; and everything else goes downhill from there. Even the dancers who are supposedly dancing the Frug, the Swim, and other 1965 period dancers are bad.
The oddest element is the incidental music played while people are talking. It's impossible to describe! I guess it was meant to be funny — a la Ozzie & Harriet, perhaps, but it's just so bad and has no real connection to the scenes in which it is played.
Sonny & Cher's performance is typical, but the song, "It's Gonna Rain Outside" is laughable.
This would have been perfect for the old 80s show MST3000, which goofed on bottom-budget movies like this. These days it's probably best for stoners who may or may not recall 1965.
The oddest element is the incidental music played while people are talking. It's impossible to describe! I guess it was meant to be funny — a la Ozzie & Harriet, perhaps, but it's just so bad and has no real connection to the scenes in which it is played.
Sonny & Cher's performance is typical, but the song, "It's Gonna Rain Outside" is laughable.
This would have been perfect for the old 80s show MST3000, which goofed on bottom-budget movies like this. These days it's probably best for stoners who may or may not recall 1965.
Voltaire was right
markwood2723 May 2015
Saw this 4/29/15 via cable on demand. A strange, generally bad movie directed by bad director Maury Dexter. Yet, as Voltaire discovered in Shakespeare, sometimes there are pearls in the manure pile. "Wild on the Beach" earns the comparison to fertilizer with e.g., the Sonny and Cher segment, which manages to combine awful music with clumsy cinematic execution. The pearl? The segment featuring the number "Run Away from Him" sung by Cindy Malone. The bit reminded me of some of the great songs and visuals in "Just for Fun" (1963). Ms. Malone's song would have benefited from Nicolas Roeg's lensing in that movie, but still the segment is surprisingly powerful, and of such high quality it seems out of place in what is in all other respects a thoroughly awful film.
Frankie and Annette,move over!
hipthornton17 November 2002
Frankie Randall (who?) and Sherry Jackson try a mean imitation of Frankie Avalon and Annette in this dreary,black and white rip-off of the beach party flicks.There's too much plot,(something about sharing a beach house,disliking each other,rousing the ire of the local college board,until the happy ending.) Frankie sings alot (songs you'll never hear again),Sherry Jackson does a nice Annette pout but it's all for naught.Sonny and Cher and the Astronauts do a brief guest bit,there's some lame comic turns (one guy is always losing his contacts,etc.),stuffy adult reactions to the kids,no beach scenes,no babes in bikinis,just alot of plot.Even boys and girls forced to share the same house isn't presented in a spicy way.Everyone is too hostile.I saw this picture when it first came out and thought it was great but I grew up!
Another teen tragedy...
moonspinner5520 September 2006
Laughably awkward teen-opus, filmed on the cheap in black-and-white, concerns young male and female college students battling each other over the rights to a swanky beach-house. It's the boys against the girls! (Wouldn't it makes things more interesting for these kids if the pad were co-ed?) Worth a quick peek for the musical cameo by Sonny & Cher down at the local hot-spot (they sing the growly slow-burner "It's Gonna Rain"), but their bit comes early--at the 22-minute mark--leaving nothing but godawful acting and teenage contrivances for the next hour. Positively painful! "Wild on the Beach" makes the A.I.P. "Beach Party" flicks seem Oscar-caliber by comparison. * from ****
THE WORST BEACH MOVIE EVER MADE
BEACHNSURF1960S22 October 2001
There is nothing wild about this movie, and there is no beach. Aside from a few stock footage scenes of surfers, there are no beach scenes whatsoever. This is not an Annette movie, but a cheap rip off. The only redeeming value of this movie to the Beach Genre is the music, which features Sonny & Cher and the Astronauts. No longer available on VHS or DVD, you'll have to find a copy on ebay, expect poor quality.
A case in point as to why the 60s are not my favorite decade in film
AlsExGal25 August 2019
Without a doubt the absolute worst beach-party-style rip-off film that I've seen, and there is plenty of competition. Adam (Frankie Randall) and Lee (Sherry Jackson) both rent the same beach house for the summer, and each refuses to give up their claim. Zero laughs and amateur drama ensue. Also featuring Russ Bender, Gayle Caldwell, Jackie Miller, and Booth Colman. If you haven't ever heard of these people, there is a reason for that. There are also performances by Sonny & Cher, The Astronauts, and Sandy Nelson. The Sonny & Cher song, "It's Gonna Rain", may be one of the worst songs in the history of Western Civilization. The entire film is like hammering a railroad spike through your foot.
Lots of beaches, no sand.
qormi28 March 2012
Warning: Spoilers
The only saving grace of this film was Sonny & Cher. Even with the little B-Side single they sang,their talent and professionalism shines through. Sonny, with his long hair way over his ears, was ultra cool compared with all those button-down collar guys in the room with their parted Brylcream hair styles. You'd be hard-pressed to find a cooler chick than Cher in 1965. After that, it was all downhill.The rock band known as "The Astronauts" featured a couple of guys strumming their guitars to a surf beat and a guy trying to sound like Elvis crooning along. They would have been booted out of the local teen club in 1965. Frankie Randall seemed like a 35-year-old college student and acted like that obnoxious guy you knew who thought he was "all that". Sherry Jackson walked around like she had PMS. Then there was some dorky guy the camera kept focusing on as all the 30 something teenagers were doing the twist and the "swim". He was an incredibly bad dancer - a complete dweeb...must have been the producer's son. This film had very little going for it - no bikinis, no surf,.....a debacle.
We all begin somewhere, They got us babe
bkoganbing6 October 2018
If 20th Century Fox was hoping for a series of beach films to rival American-International Pictures Beach Party series, then why didn't they splurge for color?
It would seem that was a given in these situations.
Taking the place of Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello are road company leads Frankie Randall and Sherry Jackson. Randall was a good singer, but surely was no actor and Jackson had a lot of trouble convincing people she was an actress because they couldn't get past her voluptuous figure. She could give a performance, but not here. I guarantee you will have heard of no one else in the cast save two.
Randall plays a young man attending Beach University in Florida and he's been given permission by one Captain Sullivan to live at his beach house while attending. A couple of weeks before the semester starts in walks Sherry Jackson the captain's niece who informs Randall and his many house guests and party guests that she is the new owner. But since the will hasn't been probated yet It's all up in the air.
In the meantime the mean old party pooper dean of the college wants this coed cohabitation put to an end.
Upon this plot several forgotten acts of the era do their thing. However the film also featured the yet unknown Sonny and Cher. We all have to make our start somewhere so Representative Bono and entertainment legendary diva Cher begin their careers here in a pale imitation beach film.
Only reason I can think of to see this film.
Taking the place of Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello are road company leads Frankie Randall and Sherry Jackson. Randall was a good singer, but surely was no actor and Jackson had a lot of trouble convincing people she was an actress because they couldn't get past her voluptuous figure. She could give a performance, but not here. I guarantee you will have heard of no one else in the cast save two.
Randall plays a young man attending Beach University in Florida and he's been given permission by one Captain Sullivan to live at his beach house while attending. A couple of weeks before the semester starts in walks Sherry Jackson the captain's niece who informs Randall and his many house guests and party guests that she is the new owner. But since the will hasn't been probated yet It's all up in the air.
In the meantime the mean old party pooper dean of the college wants this coed cohabitation put to an end.
Upon this plot several forgotten acts of the era do their thing. However the film also featured the yet unknown Sonny and Cher. We all have to make our start somewhere so Representative Bono and entertainment legendary diva Cher begin their careers here in a pale imitation beach film.
Only reason I can think of to see this film.
Low-rent "Beach Party" rip-off
frankfob10 January 2012
Way outdated plot (old-timers don't like the idea of boys and girls living together in the same house), brainless script, terrible songs that the producers apparently thought "the kids" would think was cool but definitely weren't, a bland leading man whose singing and acting are on the same level (lousy), chintzy production values (to be expected from a Lippert picture) and some of the unfunniest "comedy" bits (consisting mainly of old people tripping and falling down) in recent memory all combine to make this cheap "Beach Party" ripoff barely watchable. At least the "Beach Party" movies were shot in color so the audience would see nice shots of the beach and the ocean; this thing is shot in black-and-white, so the few scenes where you actually see the beach are bland and uninteresting.
Just about the only things this mess has going for it are Sherry Jackson, who was adorable as a child actress and grew up to be an absolute knockout; and a couple of shots of some cute girls running around a beach house in their nighties. That's it. Period.
Don't waste your time.
Just about the only things this mess has going for it are Sherry Jackson, who was adorable as a child actress and grew up to be an absolute knockout; and a couple of shots of some cute girls running around a beach house in their nighties. That's it. Period.
Don't waste your time.
Is that the gal in the episode of . . .
inspectors7125 April 2016
Star Trek, the robot, the one that my dad laughed at while making kid-appropriate, leering comments about her almost-not-there outfit?
Yup, Sherry Jackson.
And the university president, a guy who played a million officious dinkwads on TV?
Yup, whatshisname. Oh, yeah. Looked him up--Booth Colman. I always confused him with Richard Dysart, but he got his hands bitten off in The Thing.
Forgive me, I digress.
Colman would become the face of Washington Mutual Bank back in the late '70s.
And Sonny and Cher, with Cher in her 20s and, well, beautiful (before she became a Gorgon and before Sonny went to the House of Representatives--time has surprises, huh?).
So, essentially this 80 minutes of dreck is, at best, a dusty and mildewed memory album of, as I said for another recent review, a bygone era.
With regards to the Wild on the Beach . . .
Bye! Gone?
Yup, Sherry Jackson.
And the university president, a guy who played a million officious dinkwads on TV?
Yup, whatshisname. Oh, yeah. Looked him up--Booth Colman. I always confused him with Richard Dysart, but he got his hands bitten off in The Thing.
Forgive me, I digress.
Colman would become the face of Washington Mutual Bank back in the late '70s.
And Sonny and Cher, with Cher in her 20s and, well, beautiful (before she became a Gorgon and before Sonny went to the House of Representatives--time has surprises, huh?).
So, essentially this 80 minutes of dreck is, at best, a dusty and mildewed memory album of, as I said for another recent review, a bygone era.
With regards to the Wild on the Beach . . .
Bye! Gone?
Just Kinda So-So... SURF PARTY is Better/Best
TheFearmakers20 April 2019
A cross between director Maury Dexter's SURF PARTY and YOUNG SWINGERS (equaling a 1960's Surf Movie Trilogy), we have three mobile girls arriving at the beach, and there's an uptight niece played by raven-haired beauty Sherry Jackson among them...
A rudimentary twist has her uncle's death leaving her a beach party-pad that'd been used by several rowdy (albeit polite) local guys...
The year is 1965, and from the mention of college love-ins and sit-ins, it underlines a progression from the other Maury Dexter beach flicks as the plot involves a grouchy college dean (played by Booth Coleman from Dexter's RAIDERS FROM BENEATH THE SEA) who lays down an edict that only kids with housing can attend the local University...
So the boys trick the girls, and they all wind up in the same house, making things more plot-heavy than fun, funny or the kind of breezy fare Maury Dexter pulls off nicely when there's a good story and interesting characters. And the plot is repeated so often, he must have thought young audiences suffered from short-term memory loss.
The soon-to-be STAR TREK episode's perfect robot girl Sherry Jackson plays it sweet, sincere and a follower-of-rules, but there's no one more spontaneous and/or free-spirited enough for her to play off. The leading man is a weak conniving dolt, so her vulnerabilities are in vain, and uncomfortably at that.
The best scene has a singer playing herself, though she's hardly famous even then: the extremely gorgeous, short yet wonderfully voluptuous male fantasy of Cindy Malone (who played LuLu on the Adam West BATMAN) singing a great little tune called "Run Away From Him" with a fantastic echo/reverb sound (her scenes put this from a 5 rating to a 6); she's auditioning for Dexter's longest-running stock actor, Russ Bender. This groovy track's even better than the introduction of a new duo that plays along with the movie's stock band, The Astronauts... Enter Sonny and Cher singing, "It's Gonna Rain." But overall, the kids, lacking WILD, don't spend enough time ON THE BEACH: so the title means close to nothing.
A rudimentary twist has her uncle's death leaving her a beach party-pad that'd been used by several rowdy (albeit polite) local guys...
The year is 1965, and from the mention of college love-ins and sit-ins, it underlines a progression from the other Maury Dexter beach flicks as the plot involves a grouchy college dean (played by Booth Coleman from Dexter's RAIDERS FROM BENEATH THE SEA) who lays down an edict that only kids with housing can attend the local University...
So the boys trick the girls, and they all wind up in the same house, making things more plot-heavy than fun, funny or the kind of breezy fare Maury Dexter pulls off nicely when there's a good story and interesting characters. And the plot is repeated so often, he must have thought young audiences suffered from short-term memory loss.
The soon-to-be STAR TREK episode's perfect robot girl Sherry Jackson plays it sweet, sincere and a follower-of-rules, but there's no one more spontaneous and/or free-spirited enough for her to play off. The leading man is a weak conniving dolt, so her vulnerabilities are in vain, and uncomfortably at that.
The best scene has a singer playing herself, though she's hardly famous even then: the extremely gorgeous, short yet wonderfully voluptuous male fantasy of Cindy Malone (who played LuLu on the Adam West BATMAN) singing a great little tune called "Run Away From Him" with a fantastic echo/reverb sound (her scenes put this from a 5 rating to a 6); she's auditioning for Dexter's longest-running stock actor, Russ Bender. This groovy track's even better than the introduction of a new duo that plays along with the movie's stock band, The Astronauts... Enter Sonny and Cher singing, "It's Gonna Rain." But overall, the kids, lacking WILD, don't spend enough time ON THE BEACH: so the title means close to nothing.
The only film in history that seem to have been written by a four-year-old.
mark.waltz26 March 2019
Warning: Spoilers
After watching two hideously bad beach party rip off movies made at Paramount, I seemingly fell into something surprisingly even worse: a juvenile musical farce that has less intelligence than any of the silly sitcoms that have become infamous from the 1960's. Frankie Randall and Sherry Jackson headline the leads of this non-beach set beach movie, set mostly in houses and dives along the Pacific Ocean. Badly filmed in black-and-white and looking like a cheap TV special with a slight plot involving the fight over a sorority house thrown in, this immediately shows its lack of color in more ways than one. The only actual scenes of the beach occur only when cars drive by or when Randall and Jackson are standing on the back porch deck, and one brief romantic scene.
This has a novelty a featuring a future Oscar winner among the guest stars, a very young Cher (along with Sonny), singing one number very briefly and completely overshadowed by her future husband. The song selections are a mixed bag of novelties and quickly forgotten pop songs, and the comedy scenes seem to be out of something you'd see in a Three Stooges short. One moment has Jackson getting into a food battle with local college dean Booth Coleman who gives as much as he gets, but the way it is presented is an embarrassment of stupidity. The background score seems like something stolen from the vaults of cheaply made sitcomswe're at least you would have a laugh track to know when you were supposed to chuckle. This makes even the lowest quality American International "Beach" movie seems like something that Orson Welles wrote in comparison.
This has a novelty a featuring a future Oscar winner among the guest stars, a very young Cher (along with Sonny), singing one number very briefly and completely overshadowed by her future husband. The song selections are a mixed bag of novelties and quickly forgotten pop songs, and the comedy scenes seem to be out of something you'd see in a Three Stooges short. One moment has Jackson getting into a food battle with local college dean Booth Coleman who gives as much as he gets, but the way it is presented is an embarrassment of stupidity. The background score seems like something stolen from the vaults of cheaply made sitcomswe're at least you would have a laugh track to know when you were supposed to chuckle. This makes even the lowest quality American International "Beach" movie seems like something that Orson Welles wrote in comparison.
Unbelievabely Bad
lzf07 February 2009
Yes, Sonny and Cher are in it. They perform one number, but do not engage in any comedy. Speaking of comedy, what passes as humor in this film is unfunny and depressing. Justin Smith, a character actor who mostly worked in TV, gets saddled with unfunny comedy material. Making it even more horrible is the worst background music ever used for a film. It is absolutely unlistenable. The credit (?) for the score goes to Jimmie Haskell, who wrote and orchestrated for movies, TV, and albums. I hope for Mr. Haskell's sake that this job was farmed out to a ghost writer. And then there's Frankie Randall. Randall is a fine jazz pianist who made a few albums in the 1960s and was championed by Frank Sinatra. Later he became a regular attraction and entertainment director in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. He still performs and records today. As tasty as his piano and vocal stylings are, he always seems to be a bit under pitch. This problem is evident in this film and is accentuated by pop musical material which is foreign to Randall's style. He also seems a bit uncomfortable as an actor. I guess Lippert saw him as an alternative to Frankie Avalon, but Avalon is adept at comedy and can make poor pop songs sound like Cole Porter. Randall is only effective when interpreting the REAL Cole Porter songs.
A criminal waste of Sherry Jackson
elliotjames228 August 2022
The title Wild on the Beach was a fake-out. No one goes wild and no one goes wild on the beach. Maury Dexter who worked with the 3 Stooges really pulled a fast one on young movie goers spoiled by AIP's Beach Party series
The production team deserved 30 days or more in jail for making this low-budget beach party movie knockoff without a beach, shot in the cheapest studio sets and not putting Sherry and the girls in bikinis for the entire running time. Disgraceful. The only good parts were the music acts, Sonny & Cher in her youthful freshness and the Astronauts. A lecherous older music "producer" tries to bag hottie Cindy Malone. Her rendition of Run Away From Him is memorable.
A Half-Hearted Attempt at Making a Beach Party Movie
Uriah4310 March 2023
This film essentially begins with a female college student by the name of "Lee Sullivan" (Sherry Jackson) being told that she has recently inherited a house by her recently deceased uncle, and that she will be presented with the deed once his will is finalized in a couple of days. Naturally, being somewhat curious about the house, Lee decides to bring some of her female friends with her to check it out. However, once they arrive, they find that a young man named "Adam Miller" (Frankie Randall) has been living there and is currently in the process of hosting a party with a number of his friends. It is then revealed that Adam was given permission by Lee's uncle to live in the house because housing was so difficult for college students to find in that particular area. Even so, Lee is not at all happy about Adam staying there but, because she doesn't have a deed to the house, there is nothing she can do about it for at least a couple of days. That being said, left with few other choices, Lee reluctantly agrees to allow Adam and his male friends to sleep in the living room, while she and her friends occupy the bedrooms. What she doesn't realize, however, is that the local college takes a very dim view of male and female college students residing in the same house and that a senior administrator named "Dean Parker" (Booth Coleman) is determined to expel them once he has adequate proof. Now, rather than reveal any more, I will just say that this was a rather half-hearted attempt by 20th Century-Fox to capitalize on the Beach Movie craze that American International Pictures (AIP) brought to full prominence during this particular time. For starters, unlike the Beach Party movies starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, there really wasn't much chemistry between Frankie Randall and Sherry Jackson in this particular picture. Likewise, having the film shot in black-and-white certainly didn't help either. And to make matters even worse, rather than showcasing an actual beach, most of the movie took place indoors! Again though, like I said earlier, this entire production was a rather half-hearted attempt by 2oth Century-Fox. In any case, while there are a number of decent Beach Party movies out there, this isn't one of the them and I have rated it accordingly. Below average.
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