The Horror Of Party Beach

That's right, everybody! Get ready to do the Zombie Stomp with the way-out Del-Aires, while bearing witness to a strange invasion from the sea by unusual monsters looking for blood!

Anyone who is even remotely tuned in to the goofier (read "joyous") back alleys of popular culture, is probably familiar with this movie. Long story short, actor and industry gadfly Del Tenney decided to try and cash in on the surf culture craze of the early 1960s and the drive-in draw of monster movies at the same time by making a monster-in-the-surf film; not in sunny California where Gidget was shimmying with the Beach Boys, but in the chilly waters of the Atlantic off the New England coast! It was touted as the first horror musical (which is inaccurate because the infamously dull The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies beat it to the punch by months.) The movie has been dismissed as one of the worst movies of all time, and ravaged by everyone from Leonard Maltin to Stephen King, but darn if it isn't fun enough to survive. 

In 1989, Indiana Junk Rock band Sloppy Seconds included an homage to the film on their album Destroyed, and a decade later the movie gained cult film stock points when it was featured on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Click to watch trailer for The Horror Of Party Beach.

Great, you might say. That's all neat-o and everything, but what am I doing here, on this blog thingy, reading about it? Well, it just so happens that in 1964, a fumetti-style photo comic of the film was published by Warren Magazines, the gang that gave us Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella, and other horror-themed comic titles. This over-sized photo comic essentially breaks the film down into stills, tweaking a few things here and there. For example, in the comic version you can see someone has gone through and painted big scary piranha teeth into the mouths of the monsters. In the actual film, the creature's mouth is full of mollusk-like protuberances that make it look like it's walking around with a mouth full of hot dogs. 

I have a copy this here publication, and thought, since we're dealing with actual horrors and dangerous weather here in the upper Midwest, why not try to bring a little levity and joy into things. Should you be so inclined, the entirety of the The Horror Of Party Beach comic is available for download here, to peruse at your leisure.*

*Note about the files: The magazine was scanned in single page jpeg format. The download is an uncompressed file folder containing the jpegs.