Beach Balls (1988)

[StevePulaski]

Beach Balls (1988)
Directed by: Joe Ritter

Rating: ★★½

While well-known for being a decade of excess and over-saturation in a social sense, the 1980s ignited a cinematic fire with two genres that boomed and subsequently refused to die off - the slasher and sex-comedy genre. A "sex-comedy" isn't exactly the same a films like National Lampoon's Animal House and Porky's that garnered extensive mainstream recognition and praise. A "sex-comedy" is generally a film that was shot very cheaply, focused predominately on a broad setting such as a beach, a high school, or a car wash with surface-level plots, and distributed amateurishly in a nondescript fashion. Most films of the genre have gone on to live in relative obscurity, eclipsed by their own lackluster path of release, and feature actors whom you might recognize from shows and movies you've seen elsewhere.

Such comedies are Screwballs and its sequels, Joysticks, Summer Job, Private Resort, and of course, Joe Ritter's Beach Balls, which, judging by its faint praise online, might be the best when compared to the rest of the lot. Despite whatever images and thoughts come to mind when faced with its mildly suggestive cover - and the fact that, to my recollection, not a single beach ball appears anywhere throughout the entire course of this movie - the film is an acceptable retread of teen movie conventions largely because there are so many events happening at one given time and it admirably gives adequate time to most of them.

The main story revolves around Charlie Harrison (Philip Paley from Land of the Lost), a teenager with rock-star aspirations, who lounges around on the beach most days with his pal Scully (Steven Tash) to get away from his Christian-conservative parents. Charlie finds himself infatuated with two things: a guitar he can't afford and a girl he can't impress. The girl is Wendy (the late Heidi Helmer), who spends most of her days on the beach, as well, while Charlie and Scully conceive of plans to impress the young woman.

Despite being on probation for drunk driving of all things, Charlie decides that, when his parents go away, his house should be the place for a DIY hair metal concert for a band known as Severed Heads in a Bag - notwithstanding a favorite of Wendy's. Charlie sends his sister Kathleen (Leslie Danon) out with a local meathead after them that they are each quietly harboring feelings for one another and gets planning to make good use of the house during his parents' absence.

Much like sex-comedies of this era, Beach Balls' plot is thin and defined by the breezy banter of the horndog boys with dialog that always ends in a quip or a gag. It's pleasantly restrained in spite of the myriad of ways it could be mean-spirited and uncomfortably misogynist, and I think that's because Ritter and screenwriter David Rocklin know how to strain the negatives and questionable moments out of a teen flick to preserve the geniality.

However, that almost means a bit of a lengthy montage involving some seriously mediocre, but period-specific, metal music that becomes grating as it makes the film successful in approaching the 80 minute mark. The dominance of such dated schlock still doesn't manage to come at the expense of subplots in the form of Kathleen's first date, which gives us more time to see how spirited Leslie Danon is as a performer, as well as the frantic movements of Charlie as he tries to clean the house while the party is still going on in hopes that his parents don't discover his commitment to delinquency and disobeying their strict orders.

Beach Balls also challenges itself to at least recognize social constraints and problems in a way that other screwball comedies wouldn't dare. Things such as self-righteous attitudes brought on by devout beliefs, violence against women, adult conservatism contrasted with teenage liberalism, and even sex trafficking are somehow interwoven, if lightly, into the story to make the characters conscious of the world around them. A good subject to debate is whether or not it's harder to find actual teenagers with coastal mindsets to acknowledge those societal problems or films of the era, or this genre, more specifically. It might even be harder for me to find another film of this niche I enjoyed as much as Beach Balls.

Starring: Philip Paley, Steven Tash, Heidi Helmer, Leslie Danon, Tod Bryant, and Douglas R. Starr. Directed by: Joe Ritter.