Poseidon-3 An insult to any veteran of WWII or any other military campaign, this lame-brained action flick is both preposterous and unintentionally amusing. When the Japanese sink a U.S. submarine of the coast of a Philippine island, a crack team of divers is sent in to destroy the remains, lest the enemy gets its hands on state of the art equipment located in the wreckage. Brady is the captain of a different sub whose mission is to transport the divers to the scene. He and Dante reservedly welcome the men on board. Hunter leads the team which consists of Avalon, Backus, Crosby, McCrea and Aleong (no reason is given for the exclusion of Don Rickles and Michael Nader!) These mismatched, unlikely buffoons take part in various painfully-unfunny misadventures while on the sub including Avalon pouring hot coffee into Backus' crotch! (Backus was light years away from co-starring with James Dean by now!) Avalon pastes his girlfriend's picture onto a torpedo and then sings to it (TWICE!) while color travelogue footage is shown with his black & white face superimposed on it and two contrasting women emote and gesture in turn. Gritty war drama... Later, the divers move ashore and are greeted by Filipino guerrillas including the producer's girlfriend Six, who was introduced to the world in this film (and forgotten by most of the world very soon after!) With the island teeming with enemy Japanese, it's up to Hunter to find a way to complete the job, even if it turns into a suicide mission. The film has a cheap, pasted-together look with stark and unimaginatively filmed scenes on the submarine set and the "Gilligan's Island"-esquire jungle set mixed with stock footage of battle scenes and water-logged seamen drowning. Hunter, looking handsome as usual, has many close-ups of his face just staring blankly as if he was photographed without being fed any lines. Brady plays the whole thing as if this is his own personal "Run Silent, Run Deep". McCrea takes part in a ridiculous underwater scene in which he holds his breath indefinitely and swims all over the ocean before finally someone thinks of the idea of "buddy-breathing". Six is unbelievable. She's shown flailing around on the fake, moss-covered ground while a huge, fluffy, Roseanne Roseannadanna wig straddles her head. Later, she's part of a diversionary tactic in which the Japanese would rather shoot at nude swimming women than at the U.S. officers who are picking them off from above!! Apart from a few campy, ludicrous moments, the film comes to life only once and briefly. Before heading out to battle, Hunter is awakened in the night by Six, who crawls on top of him and begins rubbing him down with special oils, ripping apart his shirt and forcing him to turn over onto his belly!! When it's all said and done, the movie isn't quite finished assaulting the senses. It saves it's biggest surprise for the finale as it unleashes the tackiest, most surreal end credits sequence ever filmed. Two curvy chicks in bikinis (which have nothing, by the way, to do with this film's prior content) cavort playfully, awkwardly and goofily on the beach while a narrator fervently hopes that the horrors of what happened on Bikini Island will be displaced by the new connotation for the word "bikini"!! That little tribute surely warmed the veterans' hearts who watched this all the way to the end. Both of them!!

David Edward Martin Out of mild curiosity and boredom, I just watched OPERATION BIKINI. I'm still trying to get my brain back to semi-rational thought after seeing this train wreck. All I can think is-- the producers had a bunch of stock WW2 footage and a few rooms of a borrowed submarine set. Then they threw in a bunch of folks they had under contract. What the heck is Jim Backus doing in this thing????? The man was already a well-known character actor, from tragic roles like the father in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE to the voice of MISTER MAGOO. For no apparent reason he's a member of the UDT team that also has Tab Hunter and Franky Avalon; I'm guessing he's the naval equivalent of a sergeant, as Hunter's character is in charge but Backus seems to be the one who runs the squad. That is, when he actually has any lines. Mostly he just stands there. In fact, much of the cast just stands there. It's like the producers only had a budget for a very limited amount of dialogue and figured that if the actors simply stood there and filled the frame, that would count as acting. Scott Brady had never been a major player but, like Backus, he seems to have come in for a few days work and a paycheck. Gary Crosby was trying to make a go of it, playing off his derelict father's name and the family resemblance. Like Backus, he also mostly stands there.Oh, man.... this film is just so very wrong in so many ways..... It's like a bunch of students trying to perform a high school production of UP PERISCOPE and then they decide to rewrite the second act!And worst of all, the producers destroyed what little merit the film might have had. As it looked on paper, the film would have been a modest sub adventure, suitable for a double bill. But then they added Frankie Avalon and decided to give him musical numbers! AND THEY WERE IN COLOR!!!!!! The rest of the movie is in black and white and all of a sudden along comes this bizarre COLOR musical interlude?!?!?!?!?!? And 20 minutes later, HERE IT COMES AGAIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!Frankie Avalon also had a gratuitous musical number in his other 1963 sub adventure, VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA, but at least there it made sense!Oh, and for a final totally unrelated finale, the film ends with COLOR footage of two 1963 starlets in bikinis playing on a beach while the credits roll. Looking at that made me realize how little the producers thought of the film. OPERATION BIKINI is not a good film-- hell, it's barely adequate!-- but the color sequences show a mindset of cynical desperation or Ed-Wood-level incompetence.

semi-buff When I saw this in the cable listings, I thought, 'OMG, Tab Hunter AND Frankie Avalon in the same *serious* war movie?!' I just had to watch it. I was going to give it a few minutes till I read BrunoCat's amusing review and decided to slog through the whole thing. A mini-time capsule of a sad era in Hollywood, when actors' kids and slack-jawed pretty boys kept talented actors out of work. The double-digit IQ fairly oozes from poor Michael Dante's pores. This is the time when Sinatra's ultra cool Vegas persona was in full swing, and an attempt is made to fit Frankie into this mold. Fuhgedaboudit! Only the divine Bobby Darin could do that, and he out-cooled Sinatra most of the time. I still miss him! Another historical aspect is the view of women: the sexy/gorgeous ones are for sex, the wholesome/pretty ones for love, and the non-white ones can be sort of loved but mostly coerced, as their true purpose is to sacrifice for the white lover's success. Sadly this is still a frequent theme; "El Mariachi" (1992) comes to mind. Anyway, I agree with BrunoCat: this is something you've never seen before and should watch just for the experience!

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.