Patented 80s sludge of the most geneirc fashion, Beach Balls is a witless, laughless, and entirely worthless experience. The fact that it's not the leering jiggle-flick implied by the title and DVD case gave me pause for a second, but then I realized the movie delivers the same experience as drinking a warm glass of day-old tap water.

Philip Paley, who played Cha-Ka on Land of the Lost when he was eleven years old, stars as Charlie, a bland nice-guy beach bum who has the hots for a hottie called Wendy. For her part, Wendy has a thing for a local rocker, which places Chuck firmly in the "friend zone," but with the help of his kooky pal Scully (Steven Tash aka the kid who gets the shock treatments in the beginning of Ghostbusters), he aims to woo his woman by becoming a rock star, too.

There are also a few painful subplots about Charlie's prissy sis and Wendy's blockheaded lifeguard of a brother, but these exist only to pad out the flick's running time to a generous 77 minutes. Oh, and there's at least three concert sequences in Beach Balls, the kind that present lyrics like "Oh, it's time to rock, OH!, time to rowowowoll! Everbody knows when it's 9 o'clock, it's time to rock and rowowowollllll!"

Only marginally better than many of its breast-lovin' ilk because it at least tries to build some actual characters, Beach Balls is just another forgotten pothole in the expansive highway of truly bad 80's comedies. When producer Roger Corman goes uncredited on a flick, as he did here, you just know to stay away.

The DVD

Video: Like nearly all of the new Corman/Disney releases, the transfer is full frame and not very appealing.

Audio: Dolby Digital 2.0.

Extras: Nada. The movie actually consists of one chapter, which doesn't exactly scream of effort.

Final Thoughts

More bland and banal than it is actively offensive, Beach Balls was last seen in heavy rotation on Rhonda Shear's Up All Night schlock-a-thon on the USA network. Which means it's a really, really bad movie.

The flick also was a kiss of death to many of the participants' careers: Beach Balls was the first, last, and only film Philip Paley appeared in. Last one for Steven Tash, too. It also seems that the flick ended the careers of screenwriter David Rocklin and director Joe Ritter, who once wrote the original Toxic Avenger and last worked as an assistant cameraman on Coyote Ugly. (Gotta love the IMDb research!)