• Directed by “Ellen Cabot” (David DeCoteau)
• Written by Alexander Sachs
• Starring
  • Sarah Bellemo
  • Tamara Landry
  • Nicole Posey
  • Michael Todd Davis
  • Joe Estevez
• Produced by Karen L. Spencer
• Executive produced by Charles Band

It was probably inevitable, once Charles Band started enjoying success with his Full Moon titles (and make no mistake, the Full Moon titles were some of the most profitable in Paramount’s video distribution stable, out-earning most of their theatrical release titles), that he would expand in both directions — by which I mean, he started Moonbeam Entertainment to put out genre-related kidvids, and he started Torchlight Entertainment for “racier” fare. Torchlight only put out three titles before the Paramount deal went belly-up, of which this was the first. Let me tell you, it’s not exactly the kind of thing you want as your flagship title.

Our heroines are Xena (Sarah Bellemo), Luna (Tamara Landry), and Sola (Nicole Posey), three outer-space teenagers. You can tell what kind of movie this is going to be, or at least what their target audience is: Xena, the good girl, is first seen in an under-the-credits shower scene. Xena’s parents have gone on vacation for three days; considering that her parents are Don Swayze (brother to Patrick) and Jackie Stallone (mother to Sly, as well as his lesser-known brother Frank — sort of the “Don Swayze” of the Stallone family), I can only rejoice with her. Thanks to her two friends’ persuasion, Zena agrees to “borrow” her father’s T-Bird spaceship (which looks like a really hastily-constructed red plastic crate) for a spin; unfortunately, they run out of gas in space, and crash-land on planet Beta 45, which we around here know as earth.

Meanwhile, on said planet, eighteen-year-olds Dave (Michael Todd Davis) and Jerry (Ken Steadman) have arrived in California to stay the summer with Dave’s Uncle Bud (Joe Estevez — are you keeping a tally of the “famous nobody” relatives? Good), a notorious beach bum who lives right on the beach. And who should they meet, among the two hundred tanned extras partying on the beach, but our three space girls who have walked away from their wreckage.

Okay, now here’s where we get fragmented. Not content to give us just one hackneyed teen movie plot (such as one would find in the many Porky’s and Meatballs clones throughout their ’80s heyday), we’re going to get several here, recombined like something you’d find in a mad scientist’s lab, or at least in his refrigerator. This might not come out coherently, but here goes:

Uncle Bud is about to be evicted from his soon-to-be-condemned beach pad thanks to the machinations of rich bitch Sally (Linnea Quigley), who lives further up the hill in a mansion and used to have something going with Bud. She’s also a bikini magnate, and is trying to win a bikini design contest sponsored by Sun Bun Bikinis, run by Mr. Bun himself (Burt Ward — holy lack of a career, Batman!). It turns out that the prize amount, $30,000, is exactly what Bud would need to fix up his property, so the girls decide to try to win the prize for him. (Xena designs her own clothes — did I forget to mention that?) Also, the girls need to get more fuel for the T-Bird, so they take Dave into their confidence, and he takes a sample to Dr. Veg (Joey Travolta — what’s our tally up to now?), the New-Agey food kiosk operator on the beach who just happens to have worked for NASA; apparently he can tell the composition of the fuel from a taste, and can whip up three gallons in 48 hours. And also Uncle Bud has a terrific formula for a combination suntan lotion/sunburn relief lotion that will set the industry on its ear.

And as if THAT weren’t enough, we’ve got the endless beach parties. And I do mean endless. Dave and Jerry’s introduction to the beach party lasts exactly as long as the “Party on the Beach” pseudo-surf song that accompanies it — about four minutes of nothing but footage of the extras gyrating and bouncing (not that I’m complaining exactly, but still). Oddly enough, when they go down to the beach the next day, we get exactly the same song, for exactly as long, of all the same people gyrating again (at least it wasn’t exactly the same footage). This is called “padding.”

Now, I know what you’re all waiting for me to get to: The sex. This is the “racier” version of Full Moon, right? So where’s the softcore?

Oh, it’s there, all right — remember the shower scene? And the three girls waste no time in getting cozy with their men that evening (Dave and Jerry managed to find a stoner friend on the beach — convenient, huh?), except for Dave and Xena; she doesn’t leap into his lap until the next night. (She’s the good girl, remember?)¹ So each couple gets a softcore scene, complete with saucy-but-tender music and a fog machine. And it’s right about here that you decide that you want to shoot the editor. I don’t know if an unrated version of Beach Babes was ever released, but if there wasn’t, there’s obviously a lot of footage lying unused in somebody’s cottage somewhere. And it’s pretty obvious; we get about thirty seconds of disjointed shots for each love scene, and then abruptly we’re dumped back into the storyline. And here’s the funny part: The rest of the movie’s edited the same way, even when there’s no softcore to edit around. It’s almost as if the editor had to go back and chop story to make room for the softcore, and then chop the softcore to get the R rating.

Since I’m trying not to give any movie a completely negative review, I will point out a redeeming feature to Beach Babes‘ approach to an ostensibly “sexy” film: The attempt is at least a refreshing reprieve from the “erotic thrillers” that have dominated the field throughout the nineties. I know that there’s that whole subconscious current of danger running through wanton sex in the AIDS era, but I don’t really need to be reminded of it in a movie that’s going to great lengths to be sexy. In many ways, Beach Babes takes the carefree beach movie ethic of former decades and brings it into softcore. (This is an ethic that Charles Band has taken into his newer version of Torchlight, Surrender Cinema: They’re all genre-related softcore movies which go to great lengths to avoid the “sex with dangerous psychos” storylines that dominate the “erotic thriller” section of the video store.)

However, this strength leads right into the biggest weakness: It’s awful hard to have a softcore comedy, simply because sex isn’t funny.² Look back at the most successful of the teen-aimed sex comedies of the ’80s referenced above. Sex isn’t funny. Now, frustration — that’s funny! And how are you going to have frustration, i.e., the inability to have sex, in a softcore movie, where part of the premise is that people do have sex, frequently and visibly?

I cannot fault the attempt; if you’re going to watch something sexy, it’s a refreshing change to keep the movie away from the “intrigue-and-murder” version that spoils the experience. But I can, and do, fault the execution. It’s too unfunny for comedy, too sexy for a straightforward beach comedy, too unsexy for softcore, and too flimsy for even bubble-gum sci-fi. Sounds like a Full Moon movie if ever I saw one.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 0
• breasts: 16
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: 1 (sort of)
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0

1. Odd that Sarah Bellomo was cast as good girl Xena; of the three space girl actresses, she appears to be the only one (under her ‘other name’ of Roxanne Blaze) who’s done actual hardcore, both before and after Beach Babes. At least, the titles of some of these films — Up and Cummers Vols. 1 and 2, for example — certainly SEEM to be hardcore.[back]
2. Okay, the for-real act itself is pretty funny-looking, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.[back]