Fireball 500

Fireball 500
June 7, 1966
AIP
Drama, Musical
DVD
C-

When this movie started, I got my hopes up for a moment that Art Clokey had directed it, as I joked on my How to Stuff a Wild Bikini post.  Alas, it's just a bit of Claymation in a humorous opening that fails to set the tone for what is essentially a drama with some wisecracks and songs in it.  If Sgt. Deadhead and The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini are sort of cousins to the basic Beach Party series, this is a more distant relation, despite the cast and a script by director Asher and his frequent BP cowriter Leo Townsend.  I find racing boring, so it was guaranteed I wasn't going to like this.  Also Frankie flirts unsuccessfully with Annette, and they're mostly paired with much less attractive (personalities as well as physically) people: he with Julie Parrish, who was Dee Dee in Winter a-Go-Go, although I don't think she was wearing the unflattering blonde wig there; Annette with a very wooden Fabian, who once again doesn't sing.  Annette and particularly Frankie do, and he gets a surprisingly good, sort of Elvisy song, "My Way."  The movie is set in the South, with not only the Californian scenery unconvincingly trying to pass, but also people like the formerly Brooklynese Harvey Lembeck.

The movie has more "adult" content than the Beach Party series, with not only drinking and moonshining, but Frankie and Julie spending time together in a motel, he without his shirt, as she grabs his butt.  There's belly-dancing, with costumes that look suspiciously like Bobbi Shaw's circus outfit in Invisible Bikini.  Also, the fist fights aren't played for laughs, and Mike Nader's character dies.  (You will see it coming as soon as he has a brief bonding moment with Frankie.)  I vaguely remember trying to watch either this movie or its successor, Thunder Alley, on TV years ago but getting bored and giving up.  They're both on my DVD collection of "Frankie & Annette" movies, although this barely qualifies as an F & A movie and I think Thunder doesn't even have Frankie.  Bottom line, if you like racing or are a hardcore AIP completist, watch this with lowered standards.  All others, beware.

Besides Nader, some of the Beach Party crowd shows up, although not given much more to do than in Invisible Bikini.  Ed Garner (presumably aged up) plays the farmer, Sue Hamilton his daughter.  Beach girls turned race fans, including Fabian's "eager beavers," are Linda Opie Bent, Patti Chandler, Jo Collins, Mary Hughes, Luree Nicholson Holmes, and Salli Sachse.

Chill Wills, who plays Annette's uncle, was in It's a Gift more than thirty years earlier.  Renee Riano was the maid in Bikini Beach.  Len Lesser, who was North Dakota Pete in How to Stuff, is a man in the garage here.  Announcer Sandy Reed and Baynes Barron, Agent Bronson here, would also appear in Thunder Alley.