Surf II

The biggest joke in Surf II is that there was no Surf I. The film is an attempt to satirize teen beach party movies of the ’50s in a semi-Airplaine style and bring in contemporary ideas and attitudes. This would be done far more successfully three years later with Back to the Beach, a surf parody that takes surfing somewhat seriously. Surf II does feature most of the leads visibly catching waves, but this is hardly the impressive showcase for the sport the film centers on the way a film like Hot Dog... The Movie provides. The makers of Back to the Beach also understood that having Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello lampoon themselves is going to be far funnier than just mocking the beach setting. But Surf II is far more punk and raw than the polished Back to the Beach. The humor ranges from down-right inspired to pretty banal. The film was rightly panned when it came out, but the combo of sloppy and clever probably would have won it raves if it had someone like Richard Lester's name on it as director. There are a couple of great scenes filmed in a split-screen set with actors delivering identical lines verbatim, but there is also a cop character named Inspector Underpants, and the latter style of humor is by far the most prevalent.

Surf II was also an attempt to build a movie (kinda) around the singular actor Eddie Deezen. But a little Eddie Deezen goes a long, loooonnnnggggg way. He plays a mad scientist attempting to get revenge on the surfers who bullied and pranked him in high school. He has developed a chemically altered soda pop that will rid the beaches of all surfers by turning them into zombie punks. Only two dim-witted dudes (Eric Stoltz and Jeffrey Rogers) can thwart his evil plan. Deezen epitomized the nerd character in movies from the mid-'70s to early '80s, like Grease, Midnight Madness, I Wanna Hold Your Hand, 1941, and WarGames. The release of the only movie in which Deezen is top-billed in the same year that gave us Sixteen Candles and Revenge of the Nerds represents a kind of transition of the nerd archetype in cinema from a spastic, constantly picked-on, socially awkward looser to a far more confident and triumphant underdog taking down "the beautiful people," often by using the same shitty tactics those jocks, preppies, and authority figures wielded over him. In 1984, none of us could have predicted how nerd culture would become the dominant culture in the age of the internet and social media, but the seeds were clearly sown this year.