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80It is surprisingly timely.
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75If it doesn't always come off, enough headlong energy develops to carry it through.
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75A little Hitchcock and some good Psycho fun at the beach.
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67Its cheeky, good fun is what makes Psycho Beach Party an enjoyable, if weightless, romp.
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63Smart, fun and mildly subversive, but it rides the wave of its joke a little too long.
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63Overstays its welcome until the jokes curdle and the satire becomes a blunt instrument, but not before Busch throws some priceless one-liners.
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58For all its energy and inspired moments of giddy goofiness, Psycho Beach Party gets stuck in the sand.
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There's nothing here that's outrageous, startling or daring enough to give your funny bone a jolt.
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50While there is archival value in permanently recording this work on celluloid, the best way to really enjoy it remains live on stage.
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42Never maintains the spark necessary to sustain a feature film.
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40This unsubtle parody probably worked better on stage; its candy-colored artifice looks more than a little strained on film, and the actors are all trying really hard to be camp.
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40Ultimately, Psycho...can't overcome the redundancy of parodying a genre that long ago sank into its own satiric muck.
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40The problem is, director Robert Lee King has a hard time sustaining the aimed-for camp tone, and while there are a few well-spaced giggles to be had, the movie sputters more than it soars for most of its 95 minutes.
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30The viewer is left to ponder the number of levels on which this counts as a pointless exercise -- a parody of parodic movies, a deconstruction of transparent genres, a self-negatingly knowing example of camp.
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30Psycho Beach Party is, from the start, in dire need of the electroshock therapy that Florence ultimately undergoes.
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25Charles Busch's spoof of beach-party movies and psychological thrillers, an off-Broadway hit 13 years ago, stubbornly refuses to entertain in this unrelentingly dull film version.
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20This multigenre parody is excruciatingly slow and unamusing; a go-go dancer in the opening and closing credits does as much in a few minutes to shake up our perspective on a bygone aesthetic as the entire narrative in between.
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13Struggles like a fat kid on the gym rope to conjure up even a single decent laugh.
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Positive: 9 out of 9
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Mixed: 0 out of 9
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Negative: 0 out of 9
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NicholasA.8