Psycho Beach Party (Robert Lee King, 2000)

Lauren Ambrose, Charles Busch, and Thomas Gibson in Psycho Beach Party

Cast: Lauren Ambrose, Thomas Gibson, Nicholas Brendon, Kimberley Davies, Matt Keeslar, Charles Busch, Beth Broderick, Dani Wheeler, Nick Cornish, Andrew Levitas, Amy Adams, Kathleen Robertson, Nathan Bexton, Buddy Quaid. Screenplay: Charles Busch, based on his play. Cinematography: Arturo Smith. Production design: Franco-Giacomo Carbone. Film editing: Suzanne Hines. Music: Ben Vaughn. 

Psycho Beach Party, Charles Busch's theatrical mashup of surfer movies and slasher flicks, should have been a natural for turning into a movie, since that was the original target of the parody. Busch especially spoofs Gidget (Paul Wendkos, 1959), whose title character, played by Sandra Dee, becomes Chicklet (Lauren Ambrose). Others are similarly lampooned: Cliff Robertson's Kahuna becomes Thomas Gibson's Kanaka, James Darren's Moondoggie becomes Nicholas Brendon's Starcat, and so on. Like Gidget and other surfer-teen movies, Psycho Beach Party is full of process shots of the stars riding surfboards against a projected background, and the homoerotic subtext of the horseplay of the surfer dudes in the original is revealed for what it really is. But Busch adds murder to the mix, when characters with physical disabilities start getting bumped off -- as if they don't fit into the tanned and fit world of surf culture. Unfortunately, Psycho Beach Party falls apart on the screen because its director, Robert Lee King, fails to get his ensemble working on the same level. On the stage, Busch played Chicklet, but he knew his performance wouldn't work on the pseudo-realistic screen, so he created a role of a detective investigating the murders for himself, and the lead role went to Ambrose, who is quite good at switching from the wide-eyed teenager to the possibly schizophrenic serial killer. Brendon, who learned how to play with tongue in cheek on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, strikes the right note as Starcat, but Gibson wipes out as Kanaka, looking like he doesn't get the joke. At best, Psycho Beach Party gets a few laughs, but time has made the targets of its humor ridiculous enough that today they don't need parodying.

Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999)

Cast: Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Sydney Pollack, Todd Field, Marie Richardson, Thomas Gibson, Julienne Davis, Vinessa Shaw, Rade Serbedzija, Leelee Sobieski, Alan Cumming. Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick, Frederic Raphael, based on a story by Arthur Schnitzler. Cinematography: Larry Smith. Production design: Leslie Tomkins, Roy Walker. Film editing: Nigel Galt. Music: Jocelyn Pook.

Some people think Eyes Wide Shut is a masterpiece; others think it's pretentious hooey. While I incline toward the latter opinion, I have to wonder if Stanley Kubrick had lived to see it fully through its postproduction stage -- he died shortly after submitting a final cut to the studio -- he would have tinkered it into something that inspired less ambivalence. I also wonder if he hadn't yielded to studio pressure to cast movie stars in the lead roles, we wouldn't have found the characters played by Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman less glossy and more interesting. And then there are the orgy scenes, too choreographed to be real, although movie orgies are rarely titillating even when they're not digitally altered as the ones in the original release of the film were to avoid an NC-17 rating. The main thing for me, however, is that every time I see the movie I can't remember a few days later what it was all about. Which makes me wonder if it's about anything.