GurlyIamBeach Instant Favorite.

Bea Swanson This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Erica Derrick By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Kaelan Mccaffrey Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

bkoganbing Before Frankie Avalon was dealing with the kind of bikinis one sees on the beach in those Beach Party films, his agent got him to this turkey of a film where before the Bikini atoll was a site for the atomic bomb testing it was a small contested bit of real estate in the Pacific War.Tab Hunter leads a squad of marines including Avalon with Jim Backus as a gunnery sergeant on Captain Scott Brady's submarine on a mission. Said mission is to find a sunken American submarine near Bikini Atoll and blow it up before the Japanese take it and find that newfangled sonar it has.Among the perks are some lovely Polynesian beauties that some of the men indulge. Avalon does not, instead he has these silly out of place dream sequences where we get a couple of songs.It all gets done after a fashion. Operation Bikini was made on the cheap in black and white, the better to take advantage of some real Pacific combat footage.One really silly excuse for a war film.

nightwatch01 I agree pretty much with what everyone else wrote, so I won't reiterate the confusion, sadness and astonishment this movie subjected me to but I'm certainly relieved that other people seem to share my impression of the movie.But I am curious if anyone else agrees with me that the voice-over narration at the end (while the girls in bikinis are prancing around) sounds like a young William Shatner?Another thing that has me a little confused is why the Underwater Demolition Team ("UDT") that Tab Hunter's character was in charge of was a USMC unit, as opposed to a Navy UDT (precursor to SEALs, which didn't come around until the 1960s).

dougbrode Someone once wrote a fascinating essay on the subject of abject incompetence as unintentional surrealism, and anyone intrigued enough to want to see proof of that need look no further than Operation Bikini, a film that's so woefully awful it just may be the work of a genius none of us can understand and the world won't fully appreciate for decades. The film's stars are Frankie Avalon and Eva Six, who that same year made a film called Beach Party, and a number of teenagers went to see this low-budget WWII 'action' flick thinking that they were heading for surf city. Surprised there were no riots in the theatre. Though the film is in black and white, whenever Frankie, aboard a Naval ship heading to bikini atoll for an attack, dreams about his girl back home (why isn't she played by Annette?), the image is suddenly in color. He's tempted away from virginal purity by an island girl, but she's a California blonde! There's no reason why his character would sing (except that the non-singing character is played by a singer), but then again, Frankie broke into song in the middle of The Alamo, a far more prestigious picture, so why not here? There's another color sequence at the end, by the way, in which two California girls stroll along the beach in bikinis - which has nothing to do with the film other than the bathing suit was named after the atoll. All the big shooting scenes, on the sea and on land, are stock footage, and the black and white of them doesn't match with the film itself. Tab Hunter is the rugged (?!) commander who falls in love with the island girl they DO meet, Hungarian born Eva Six. She bites his hand, makes love to him at night, then dies (while nude, though you can't see anything) at the hands of Japanese soldiers who would rather machine gun her and three other lovelies than defend themselves from attacking Americans. This is either the most awful WWII movie ever made or some experimental form of avant garde cinema that, to date, no one has yet 'gotten.'Richard Bakalyan

John Seal Operation Bikini is a unique entry in filmmaking history. AIP knew they had a bankable star in Frankie Avalon, but they hadn't quite found the right formula for him, so they stuck him in this war programmer about the Submarine Service. Also along for the ride are Jim Backus, Jody McCrea, Tab Hunter, and a bunch of other familiar faces. The film is basically Beach Party At Sea, and is surely the only film bold enough to feature Frankie singing schlocky pop songs in between explosions and two fisted action. Not only does Frankie sing, he does it whilst projected in black and white against a proto-psychedelic colour background of nubiles and nymphets. Your jaw will drop. Save one last gasp of indignation for the truly tasteless ending which could only have come from the over-heated imagination of Samuel Z. Arkoff.