Really Surprised!

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

Before Frankie Avalon was dealing with the kind of bikinis one sees on the beach in those Beach Party films, his agent got him to this turkey of a film where before the Bikini atoll was a site for the atomic bomb testing it was a small contested bit of real estate in the Pacific War.Tab Hunter leads a squad of marines including Avalon with Jim Backus as a gunnery sergeant on Captain Scott Brady's submarine on a mission. Said mission is to find a sunken American submarine near Bikini Atoll and blow it up before the Japanese take it and find that newfangled sonar it has.Among the perks are some lovely Polynesian beauties that some of the men indulge. Avalon does not, instead he has these silly out of place dream sequences where we get a couple of songs.It all gets done after a fashion. Operation Bikini was made on the cheap in black and white, the better to take advantage of some real Pacific combat footage.One really silly excuse for a war film.

I prefer films that are not good and do not pretend to be anything else, than many overblown pretentious productions financed by big companies that try to pass for more than what they really are: little bad motion pictures in disguise, behind big names, expensive sets, costumes and make-up. "Operation Bikini" does not pretend to be anything else than a routine, low- budget war programmer made by American International Pictures, with some actors who once were in better vehicles (Scott Brady, Tab Hunter, Gary Crosby), new talent used in AIP productions that would fare much better in later "beach party" movies (Frankie Avalon, Jody McCrea), reliable professionals as Michael Dante and even Jim Backus, plus an Hungarian "Miss Whatever" (Eva Six, playing a Japanese woman) and a bunch of California blondes to spice things up a bit, and a map of Mexico passing for some location on the Asian Pacific. Do not expect much from this, it is certainly not good, so just take it for what it is. Now, it sure did help to have a film editor as director, for Anthony Carras really did wonders combining the scenes he shot with stock footage of war action. Proceed at your own risk, but believe me: there are really worst things than this pretending to be "masterpieces".

As if the really fake submarine deck scenes and awful dialog wasn't bad enough, we then have to contend with the Eva Six character falling in love with Tab Hunter, right after he HITS HER. I guess that's what defined male/female relationships in 60's cinema. "Beat me up and I will immediately fall for you." Thankfully, she dies before the end of the movie, so we don't have to imagine them going back to the States to continue this ugliness as a married couple.Jim Backus looked so bad in this movie that I had to infer that he was preparing for his role in "Gilligan's Island." His delivery was stilted, slow and terrible - as though he had to be prompted from off-camera before each line. The whole production must have consisted of scenes wrapped after the first take.

An insult to any veteran of WWII or any other military campaign, this lame-brained action flick is both preposterous and unintentionally amusing. When the Japanese sink a U.S. submarine of the coast of a Philippine island, a crack team of divers is sent in to destroy the remains, lest the enemy gets its hands on state of the art equipment located in the wreckage. Brady is the captain of a different sub whose mission is to transport the divers to the scene. He and Dante reservedly welcome the men on board. Hunter leads the team which consists of Avalon, Backus, Crosby, McCrea and Aleong (no reason is given for the exclusion of Don Rickles and Michael Nader!) These mismatched, unlikely buffoons take part in various painfully-unfunny misadventures while on the sub including Avalon pouring hot coffee into Backus' crotch! (Backus was light years away from co-starring with James Dean by now!) Avalon pastes his girlfriend's picture onto a torpedo and then sings to it (TWICE!) while color travelogue footage is shown with his black & white face superimposed on it and two contrasting women emote and gesture in turn. Gritty war drama... Later, the divers move ashore and are greeted by Filipino guerrillas including the producer's girlfriend Six, who was introduced to the world in this film (and forgotten by most of the world very soon after!) With the island teeming with enemy Japanese, it's up to Hunter to find a way to complete the job, even if it turns into a suicide mission. The film has a cheap, pasted-together look with stark and unimaginatively filmed scenes on the submarine set and the "Gilligan's Island"-esquire jungle set mixed with stock footage of battle scenes and water-logged seamen drowning. Hunter, looking handsome as usual, has many close-ups of his face just staring blankly as if he was photographed without being fed any lines. Brady plays the whole thing as if this is his own personal "Run Silent, Run Deep". McCrea takes part in a ridiculous underwater scene in which he holds his breath indefinitely and swims all over the ocean before finally someone thinks of the idea of "buddy-breathing". Six is unbelievable. She's shown flailing around on the fake, moss-covered ground while a huge, fluffy, Roseanne Roseannadanna wig straddles her head. Later, she's part of a diversionary tactic in which the Japanese would rather shoot at nude swimming women than at the U.S. officers who are picking them off from above!! Apart from a few campy, ludicrous moments, the film comes to life only once and briefly. Before heading out to battle, Hunter is awakened in the night by Six, who crawls on top of him and begins rubbing him down with special oils, ripping apart his shirt and forcing him to turn over onto his belly!! When it's all said and done, the movie isn't quite finished assaulting the senses. It saves it's biggest surprise for the finale as it unleashes the tackiest, most surreal end credits sequence ever filmed. Two curvy chicks in bikinis (which have nothing, by the way, to do with this film's prior content) cavort playfully, awkwardly and goofily on the beach while a narrator fervently hopes that the horrors of what happened on Bikini Island will be displaced by the new connotation for the word "bikini"!! That little tribute surely warmed the veterans' hearts who watched this all the way to the end. Both of them!!