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Purely Joyful Movie!

Perfect cast and a good story

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Ski Party (1965)* (out of 4) College buddies Todd (Frankie Avalon) and Craig (Dwayne Hickman) are constantly wondering how one of their classmates is constantly able to bring in the ladies. They decide to follow him to a ski resort where they hope to learn but instead they both end up in drag.SKI PARTY is, apparently, connected to the BEACH PARTY series but I personally find that to be somewhat of a stretch. Either way, this is a really awful movie on many levels and it has only a few things that keeps it from being a complete disaster. The highlight of the film is a sequence where James Brown shows up to sing "I Feel Fine" and it's like a shot of energy because up until then the movie was a real drag. There are also a couple fine jokes but that's about it.The rest of the movie is a complete mess that seems to have been thrown together using leftover jokes from previous movies. The entire premise is a rip-off of SOME LIKE IT HOT but it just doesn't work. Avalon and Hickman contain no chemistry together and their comic timing is just awful. Neither Deborah Walley or Yvonne Craig bring much to the picture and the supporting players are just as bland.The entire movie has a very cheap feel to it but the biggest problem is that it's just never funny. The movie is a complete bore from start to finish and should be avoided.

TCM must have been feeling in a strange mood on January 14, 2014. Consecutively they played a string of bad as in really bad musical comedies from the 1960's. OK what was I doing watching this nonsense. Well I was working on an article and I prefer having some noise in the background and it might as well be a movie even if my attention to it is sporadic at best. Of the lot Ski Party had to be the worst of the lot. Take Frankie Avalon and Dwayne Hickman disguising themselves as girls ala Tony Curtis and Jack Lemon in Some Like it Hot but not to escape but instead just to get into the girls dorm. Of course there had to be some guy after one of them. Instead of Joe E. Brown we had some hunk making a fool of himself. But the real knee slapper came when James Brown and the Flames came out in bad, really bad ski sweaters and sang. Unfortunately for James Brown it was all so contrived it was more laughable then it was anything else. Anyway add in some absolutely atrocious special effects along with the bad lines and contrived idiotic situations and you have a - well one really bad movie. Albeit somewhat amusingly entertaining.

To begin with, I understand that I am not sitting down to watch great cinema, such as 'Citizen Kane'. On the other hand, I am quite struck by the silliness of all of the beach movies, and you can throw this into the mix, along with all of those incredibly inane Elvis movies.On the plus side, you have the hopelessly cute Deborah Walley, the very hot Yvonne 'Batgirl' Craig. Also an asset is seeing Lesley Gore and the Godfather of Soul, James Brown. Although, I must confess, it's a bit unsettling having James Brown break into your ski home around all of those nice white boys and girls. At least the crackers seem to enjoy James' soul music.On the negative side, we are treated to Frankie Avalon and Dwayne Hickman in drag. And, like most teenage comedies of its time, it's not funny.I suppose if you were raised in sunny California, this might elicit some 'memories'. But all of these teenage romps, along with just about any Elvis movie you can name, has no basis in reality for most people.Even the Beatles went Hollywood, with the preposterous 'Help!' 'Help!' of course features a wonderful Lennon-McCartney movie score, but the preposterous plot is as silly as Elvis playing a race car driver. It doesn't 'help' that the Fab Four's first film proved that you could make a quality, amusing film about pop music stars without insulting the viewers' intelligence.The only true joy to be derived from most of the teenage movies of this period are the musical acts that are featured in so many of them. It would have been nice to have cut Ms. Walley's and Mr. Avalon's music segues and include more James Brown and Lesley Gore.I like a lot of bad movies. Some of them are really enjoyable. 'Ski Party' is not.

As with films about teenagers, the actors seem rather old. Dwayne Hickman is ancient even for 1965 but who really cares? The gags are silly. Confusing a Swede with a Southerner is not quite funny. Robert Q. Lewis would have been dated in 1965, let alone now.The girls' bottoms, however, are nice as are their tops. I still have no idea who watched these movies at the time of their release. The teenagers I knew at the time were—well, not likely to have cared for these films but the movies might have been background for other activities. Who wants to make out during a Bergmann film? The soundtrack is not bad, however. It has James Brown! The scenery is okay. I think that these films might have created a space for such classic titillation feminist works as T.O.P.S. I like how the filmmakers worked in a pool scene at the ski resort. I used to go to those places and they did have pools (and bikinis).