In the same year that Dr Martin Luther King received the Nobel Prize, audiences queued up to see Horror Of Party Beach, a movie where rubber-suited fish monsters are thwarted by an apparently uneducated black maid played by Eulabelle Moore. You see, radioactive waste has created monsters that carry off bikinied starlets, attack drunks and invade slumber parties, and science cant stop it. Fortunately for our scientist hero, his maid is given to yessuh massuh dialect humour and ignorant enough to ascribe events to superstition (Its duh Voo Doo! Dats what it is!). With such a lowly role, we might expect Ms Moore simply to disappear from the proceedings, but her presence in fact proves crucial to the plot. When she accidentally spills salt on a creatures tissue sample, causing it to burn up (Ise sorry! Oh lordy lordy!), the doc gets the break he needs and the means with which to destroy the creatures. Thats the answer weve been looking for! he proclaims, and immediately sets about making the beach safe for booze hounds, promiscuous teenagers and white supremacists once more.
Ian Watson is the author of 'Midnight Movie Madness', a 600+ page guide to "bad" movies from 'Reefer Madness' to 'Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead.'
