“What Are You Afraid Of, A Fate Worse Than Death?”: How Funny Women Survive Clue’s Anti-Party

A party, according to Clue (1985), is a sinister exercise in social engineering and surveillance. Set in 1954 in a remote, gloomy mansion and laced with references to McCarthyism—“Communism was just a red herring!” is a famous quote—the film chronicles a soirée where the guests are held captive and must conceal their true identities. As […]

Killer Waves: Beach Girls and the Monster

In his review of Muscle Beach Party in the New York Times on May 28, 1964, Bosley Crowther, the granddaddy of mid-century film criticism, succinctly describes one of the central features of the new genre of “beach party film”: “a tangle of vigorous young people with beautiful bodies and empty heads.” In the era of […]