Disjointed but markedly entertaining (maybe it’s all the breasts) is The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini, the ninth entry in AIP’s highly successful Beach Party series. There’s nary a Frankie nor an Annette, but their absence matters not. Hell, in my book, nothing else matters when you have super-stacked Susan Hart (Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine) in your movie. It’s just too bad her damned bikini is invisible!

She fills the spiritual role of a recently departed, but still totally hot soul who hangs around the haunted mansion of newly dead Hiram Stokely (Boris Karloff), whom Hart tells can gain entrance into heaven and be young again if he can do a good deed within 24 hours. Four of his potential heirs — including a golly-gee Tommy Kirk and corrupt lawyer Basil Rathbone — show up at the house for the reading of his will and to find his hidden million-dollar fortune.

Coinciding is the arrival of a busload (literally, a busload!) of teenagers in their swimsuits, shaking their tailfeathers to the groovy tunes of the Bobby Fuller Four, who experience seizure-like jerks as they perform. A MILFy Nancy Sinatra is among the bunch, and she belts out a number of her own. There’s a plant among the teens in the form — and oh, what a form! — of Quinn O’Hara as Sinestra, a curvy, busty, nearsighted redhead who plots to kill one of the young men on the hunt for the treasure. What is it about attempted murder that makes for lighthearted comedy?

I don’t even have room to mention the gang of bikers led by Eric Von Zipper (Harvey Lembeck), a runaway gorilla, a requisite old lady, the most offensive portrayal of an American Indian in motion-picture history, the basement-housed chamber of horrors, a kajillion non-sequiturs, two kajillion slapstick bits, a knife-wielding mummy in a wig, and a bubble monster roaming the halls.

And of course, the occasional appearance of Hart’s blue-tinted apparition causing all sorts of comic chaos. I’m sure there’s more, but a brain can only hold so much. —Rod Lott

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I think we can all agree that what kept those ’70s Kurt Russell Walt Disney films from reaching states of true transcendence was their unwillingness to explore what an average teenage boy would really do if he became freakishly strong (The Strongest Man in the World), invisible (Now You See Him, Now You Don’t) or intelligent (The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes) — namely, use his newfound powers to see boobs and get laid. Zapped! served as an early ’80s attempt to both correct this error and launch the cinematic careers of future Charles in Charge co-stars Scott Baio and Willie Aames.

History has proven this was ill-advised.

Baio plays Barney, a teenage genius who inadvertently gains telekinetic powers when his experiments go awry. A better film might have used his odd situation to develop an actual plot, but the filmmakers behind Zapped! decided instead to just use it as an excuse to tell a series of increasingly unfunny sex, drug and bodily function jokes, causing much more sadness than laughter. It doesn’t help that the two stars have all of the charisma you’d expect from two future reality show has-beens.

Even worse is the film’s reluctance to embrace its own depravity. For a teen sex comedy, Zapped! is woefully short on sex and surprisingly light on gratuitous nudity. One only has to look at the end credits and read “A double was used for Miss [Heather] Thomas in her nude scene and in the photograph” to appreciate the depths of the project’s failure. —Allan Mott

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