Hoping to follow AIP’s Beach Party to a box-office bonanza, Warner Bros. made its own film following that hit’s formula with one glaring exception: setting it nowhere near a beach. In fact, Palm Springs Weekend posits that each Easter weekend, horny college students from Los Angeles would rather flock to the California desert county for “sex, sand and suds.” Technically speaking, viewers get one out of the three.
That Scorchy Connie Stevens takes second billing as Gayle, an 18-year-old posing as 21. Vying for her affections are rich asshole Eric (Robert Conrad, then fresh from TV’s Hawaiian Eye with Stevens) and Texas good ol’ boy Stretch (Ty Hardin, 1967’s Berserk). Also converging at the same hotel — at which no one has reservations — is L.A.’s top collegiate basketball team, including a lemon-faced, banjo-strumming goofball named Biff (Jerry Van Dyke, TV’s Coach) and a future doctor (Phantom Gunslinger Troy Donahue) who takes kindly to the local chief of police’s daughter, Bunny (a brunette Stefanie Powers, Die! Die! My Darling!).
Directed by Sergeant Dead Head’s Norman Taurog, Palm Springs Weekend packs itself with so many people and so many storylines, it fails to give accurate time to let any of them play out to a point we recognize as “plot.” And that’s okay, because it’s a helluva good time. When your big set piece is Biff accidentally spilling a bottle of detergent into the hotel pool (fulfilling the promise of “suds”), your movie isn’t aiming any higher than the funny bone. In that aspect, the Technicolor fantasy succeeds in matching the genial Beach Party — and we do mean “genial,” not “genital,” as Connie copies Annette by being wound Timex-tight.
But wait — there’s more! Among the mugging, pratfalling fray are an uncredited Linda Gray, Dawn Wells, Bugs Bunny and future Tarzan Mike Henry; a pre-Lost in Space Billy Mumy as a 9-year-old from hell; the great character actor Jack Weston (Fuzz) as the team’s coach; a casino-gigging Modern Folk Quartet singing its big hit (?) about an ox driver; and a bespectacled young man (Mark Dempsey, Valley of the Dragons) who hiccups every time he thinks about sex. If any character does the deed over the Weekend, it’s not apparent. However, with a smile and a wink, Bunny’s cop father (Andrew Duggan, In Like Flint) does insulate he was quite the date rapist in his day. —Rod Lott