I'll admit, when this one first started, I was a little leery as the opening coda nuzzled right up to THEM! (1954), right down to the two officers finding a little girl, wandering the beach in stunned silence, with what's left of her parents strewn about the sand.
Then one officer takes the girl back to town, while the other remains to investigate a reeking pile of debris near the water’s edge only to find it occupied. Splat! Slash! Screech!
Okay, I said, Is that all you got? And then the theme song cranked up and some of the most nifty animated credits kicked in and the film had me -- sorry-not-sorry, I'm just a sucker for bouffants, mini-skirts, go-go boots, and lo-fi guitar licks. Sue me.
To be blunt, Jay Wade Edwards' Stomp! Shout! Scream! (alias Monster Beach Party A-Go-Go, 2005) is less of a spoof and more of a dramatic (and hilarious) recreation of those mash-up films of the 1960s, where they threw a rubber monster at Frankie and Annette while Dick Dale or the Del-Aires thundered and wailed-away like The Beach Girls and the Monster (1965) or The Horror of Party Beach (1964); it even throws in a late ‘Horror of STDs’ curve-ball that I never saw coming and left me flat on the floor, gasping for air.
“I’d been watching every ‘60s beach party movie I could find, along with trying (unsuccessfully) to start my own garage rock band (we learned "Louie Louie" and played it over and over),” said Edwards (Garage Rock Blog, September 12, 2004) “In every one of those movies, Annette would get angry at Frankie and walk the beach singing a lonesome lament. My friends in the Atlanta all-girl rock band Catfight! had written a song several years ago about a girl who has a summer romance that leaves her with more than a broken heart. The song was the perfect marriage of 1960s nostalgia and twisted humor.” And the song was called “Syphilis.”
Aside from that, what followed was just a checklist of B-movie nods and pilfered plot points that were set-up and deftly knocked-over by the Violas, Theodora, Carol and Judy (Bronson, Evans, Kraft), an upstart all-girl band with a broken down car, leaving them stuck in a small Florida town where something is terrorizing the locals and ripping them to shreds.
And while they negotiate a trade for *ahem* ‘services rendered’ with a local mechanic named Hector (Young), enter our square-jaw with the thin tie, glasses and smoking pipe. Meet John Patterson (Green), a flora and fauna expert from the local university, who realizes the latest hurricane has washed ashore a deadly Skunk-Ape -- Florida's very own version of Bigfoot / Sasquatch, who has a taste for human blood and a thing for female lead singers. Mayhem ensues.
Edwards got his start as an editor on a lot of animated programs for the original Adult Swim line-up on the Cartoon Network, working on things like The Scooby-Doo Project (1999), Space Ghost Coast to Coast (1996-2003) and The Brak Show (2000-2007). He would also produce Aqua Teen Hunger Force (2000-2015) and Squidbillies (2005-2021) for the channel’s second and third wave of oddball toons. Stomp! Shout! Scream! would be both his directorial and feature debut.
While poking around Edwards' personal blog, which covered the making of the film from start to finish, turns out he had already envisioned two possible sequels.
Said Edwards, “When I was finishing the writing of Stomp! Shout! Scream!, I realized it should be the start of a Skunk Ape Trilogy. I came up with an arc for the three movies pretty quickly. The first was a 1966 Beach Party movie with a Garage Rock soundtrack; the second , a 1972 Animals Attack movie with Country music; and third, a 1977 Punk Rock movie (the exact movie genre on this one still isn’t quite clear).”
(L-R) Claire Benson and Jay Wade Edwards.
Alas, it never came to be (-- at least not yet.) It could’ve been interesting, for sure, with the second spoofing films like Day of the Animals (1977) or Night of the Lepus (1972); and for the third I would go with extraterrestrials and flying saucers in a Without Warning (1980) or Repo Man (1984) vein. (Mr. Edwards, call me. I have ideas.)
I think what I appreciated most about Edwards’ efforts was how the movie never once stopped to acknowledge what it was sending up, to cloying show how clever they were being, and just presented what drew him and we in the audience to these kinda things in the first place:
Goofy-ass monsters with crappy costumes (-- here it was an off-the-rack gorilla suit), and special shout-out to Edwards for the Skunk-Apes vocalizations being horked from the ultimate crypto-doc, The Mysterious Monsters (1975); endearing characters; and a kickin' soundtrack with our all girl three-chord power trio standing in for the group Catfight, whose provided tunes proved so hideously infectious it's downright sinister.
And just like with those old movies, we love 'em best when they overachieve to something far beyond their budgetary limitations or perceived lack of skills on both sides of the camera. That's not a knock, honestly. And Stomp! Shout! Scream! not only met my expectations but exceeded them. Give this one a spin, Fellow Programs, whatever title you find it under.
Originally posted on May 26, 2015, at Micro-Brewed Reviews.
Stomp! Shout! Scream! (2005) Stomp Shout Scream LLC :: Indican Pictures / EP: Jay Wade Edwards / P: Arma Benoit, Evan Lieberman / D: Jay Wade Edwards / C: Evan Lieberman / E: Jay Wade Edwards / M: John Cerreta / S: Claire Bronson, Cynthia Evans, Mary Kraft, Travis Young, Jonathan Michael Green, Adrian Roberts, Bill Szymanski
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