“Whoa! You’re beach babes from beyond.”
“You bet your ass, man.”
I’m a big fan of David DeCoteau’s early work with Charles Band and Full Moon, but with “Beach Babes from Beyond,” I might have finally found something of his I really dislike. It’s a nineties softcore skin flick (from Band’s softcore label Torchlight Entertainment) that feels like an eighties science fiction comedy. And when I say that it’s softcore, I mean soft. The sex scenes don’t really look like two people have sex so much as they resemble two naked people trying to climb over one another to get in to bed. Not that it matters, since there are only about three sex scenes and they’re not the highlight of the movie, mysteriously.
“Beach Babes” has the best cast of any David DeCoteau film yet. There’s the lovely Linnea Quigley who is shockingly cast as the “crusty older woman” and villain of the film. There’s a brief performance from Burt Ward, and there’s a slew of interesting performers like John’s brother Joey Travolta, Sly’s mother Jackie Stallone, Emilio’s uncle Joe Estevez, and Patrick’s young brother Don Swayze. With a cast like that, how could you possibly go wrong? Well, it goes wrong. “Beach Babes” essentially shows our trio of gorgeous aliens’ crash landing on Earth. Landing on a California beach, they run in to a group of beach bums, all of whom want to party and work toward helping their friend Bud (Estevez) save his beach front property. The girls’ main goal is derailed when they decide to engage in a bikini contest to help Bud, and eventually work on getting back home.
The movie is filmed in such a blurry filter that apparently every director filmed softcore with in the nineties and despite being about alien babes crash landing on Earth, their plot makes up only about thirty percent of the film. The movie is two minutes shy of ninety minutes, and there is a ton of filler trying to keep the run time occupied. There are very long montages of dancing and running around with absolutely no dialogue and zero plot progression, which eventually becomes irritating. There’s a very long sequence in the middle involving a bunch of beach bimbos and buff men dancing on a beach, and in the finale there’s what feels like a ten minute concert with a trio of beach babes dancing to a large crowd of beach bound extras. You’d be hard pressed to call “Beach Babes” a science fiction film, and honestly, you’d be hard pressed to call it an entertaining one. It’s barely a decent diversion.