Wow, so after all these years I finally catch up with the last of the 'Beach Party' films - and discover it's very funny and quite worthwhile, despite the lack of Annette in it. At an Air Force base, Frankie Avalon is a nebbish young airman and Deborah Walley is his pretty fiance; Avalon accidentally shoots himself into space with a chimp and when he returns, cosmic rays have transformed him into Ben Grimm, the ever-lovin' THING. Okay, not really, but the rays DO give him a personality makeover so he's a big jerk. His superior officers had covered their butts with his stowawayedness by proclaiming him a volunteer and a hero, so they bring in a double for him who can act unjerky, but - which one is going to marry Miss Walley? Several songs and dances and lots of sequences of female Air Force personnel in the showers or towels later, we'll find out. If you've read this far, you're probably thinkin' I'm liking another terrible Beach Party film (I'm rather famous for that), but I'm not. This is actually a good movie, mostly because of the 'adult' cast, headed by Eve Arden (who sings and dances), Fred Clark as the goofy head of the base, and visiting higher-ups Cesar Romero, Gale Gordon, and Reginald Gardiner. Pat Buttram is the President of the United States(!), John Ashley, Harvey Lembeck, and Dwayne Hickman are on base, too. Million-dollar Dialog: Gen. Clark gives an order to the MPs regarding Sergeant Dead Head: 'Get him out of here! Put him in solitary!! Do bad things to him!!!' You'd think Beach Party offshoots wouldn't have much of a back story, but this one does. AIP hired Norman Taurog to come and make a pair of Disney-style comedies for them to star Tommy Kirk: this one and Sergeant Dead Head Goes to Mars. Avalon stepped in for Kirk at the last minute, and the film wasn't successful so the sequel never got made. Instead, Taurog was assigned, um, Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine and then was sent back to MGM to make Elvis movies. Several songs in this one, typical mid-60s pap but any movie where Donna Loren sings is okay by me, chums. Million-dollar Song Lyrics: Love is losing a ten-dollar bill / And the feeling you get when it's found!' This was one of the very last screen appearances of Buster Keaton, who passed away a few months later, and I'm very, very happy to report that he's looking good, does a huge pratfall, and gets a lot of laughs in his sequences, all of which are strictly pantomime. According to the wiki on this film, the script said 'Buster does a bit here' and they just let him do what he wanted, and DAMN if only Columbia or MGM had had the same amount of sense. There's also a funny running gag about the 'air base band', which only knows one tune, Jingle Bell, and plays it at the most inopportune times, including weddings. Oh, and all those pretty WAVEs in skimpies. This is a good movie. Now, if only Annette had been in it... \*sigh\*