Review of Teen Beach Movie
So Disney Channel has this thing called a “Disney Channel Original Movie”. These are exactly what it says on the tin: Original movies made for airing on Disney Channel. Technically they started out their life as “Disney Channel Premiere Films” in the 1980s, but re-branded to the now-familiar “Disney Channel Original Movie” branding in 1997. I watched a lot of these growing up. Their premieres always felt like an event, and in a way they were private, cool movies that grown-ups didn’t get to watch. Some personal highlights include High-School Musical 1 & 2, Phineas and Ferb the Movie: Across the 2nd Dimension, The Cheetah Girls franchise, the Halloweentown franchise, and Wizards of Waverly Place: The Movie. This review is for Teen Beach Movie, a DCOM that came after my time. I asked my younger sister about it and she told me that she remembered really liking this movie at the time. Granted, she was 9 at its release, but I think a 9 year old’s opinion on a DCOM is probably the most valuable opinion there is about it. So I went into the movie honestly looking forward to it. And I was not disappointed.
Teen Beach Movie (2013, directed by Jeffrey Hornayda) tells the story of two surfers who are dating: Brady and Mack. Brady is a big fan of 1960s musical “Wet Side Story”, which is about a group of surfers and a group of bikers, the rivalry between them, and the forbidden love that blossomed between two of their members. Trouble arises when Brady and Mack get swallowed by an incredibly powerful wave, and when they come out of the water, they find that they’re inside the movie. Even worse than that, the surfer dude who’s supposed to fall for the biker girl actually falls for Mack, and the surfer girl falls for Brady! So now they have to find a way to keep the movie’s events intact by making the movie characters fall in love, in order to try to escape to the real world.
There’s a lot to love here. Brady is the ultra-fan of the original movie, so he knows all of the songs and has no issue immediately self-inserting into its musical numbers. Mack has no patience for musicals, and serves as the sarcastic “Wow, so we’re doing this” character. It’s easy to picture a more sarcastic/cynical movie having her voice be the dominant one, but because the movie is guided by Brady’s earnest enjoyment of a dumb 1960 musical, we, too, earnestly enjoy the movie without any hint of irony. The choice to have Brady and Mack be partners from the beginning of the movie (rather than have them realize their love by the end) is one that I’m a huge fan of as well. It really helps make the narrative more unique, especially because, even though the movie characters fall for them, they never really budge from their love. There’s no moment of doubt where they think they might like the corresponding biker/surfer more. It’s a nice kind of wholesomeness that I appreciate.
The musical numbers themselves are a lot of fun. The movie leans really hard into the surfing thing (more so than the biking thing, which is a choice that makes sense) and the end result is really fun to watch. The songs are good, and the choreography is good. Not much I can nitpick here. The movie also plays around with the fact that the main characters are stuck inside of a movie. At a certain scene in the movie, we see a time-skip, and we see how time literally skipped for our main characters and how befuddled they are by it.
There’s a classic subplot wherein Mack helps the biker girls realize that they don’t need to center what they do around what boys will like, and culminates in your standard “Girls can do anything” message, which some people might roll their eyes at. I’d like to remind those people that this movie’s target audience is people like my sister, who was 9 years old at the time, and that that choice makes perfect sense and isn’t overbearing on the narrative at all.
There’s also a villain which I’ve neglected to mention. He’s an evil real estate mogul called “Les Camembert” who plans to use a weather machine built by a mad scientist to turn the beach into an inhospitable place, so he can buy the land and make a resort. His performance is really funny, and a Brady describes him as such: “That’s him. He’s all British and proper, but he’s from Pittsburgh”. It’s a very silly cliche movie villain performance and he completely chews the scenery every time he’s on screen, it’s really fun to watch.
I was also somewhat surprised by how funny the movie is. There’s a lot of neat little gags that land perfectly, and the 1960s dialogue is perfectly exaggerated and ridiculous.
Overall, I think Teen Beach Movie is a perfectly fun, charming way to spend an hour and a half. If it sounds like something you might like, definitely check it out. I’ll be watching the sequel, Teen Beach 2, very soon, and writing another review on it. Seeya then.
