Today is Friday, August 1, 2025. Yesterday I was absent from this venue because I decided to see a film at the IFC Center in Manhattan at the last moment, even though weather forecasters were predicting flash flooding for most of the day. I waited until about 5:15 to reserve my ticket to see a 25-year-old parody of beach and slasher flicks called Psycho Beach Party starring the inimitable Charles Busch, Lauren Ambrose, and a very young Amy Adams. Last night marked the second night it was being shown and I couldn’t resist seeing a panel of the actor/screenwriter himself and the director of the production, Robert Lee King, after the movie was screened. I bought a senior membership ticket for the 7 o’clock show online at 5:15, so it was time to leave already.

The theater the film was being screened in was the largest auditorium in the venue, so I found an aisle seat a few rows from the stage. A young, perky woman introduced herself as the publicity director of the theater and said that the Q&A would proceed at film’s end.

The plot involves Florence Forrest (Lauren Ambrose), a sixteen-year-old high school senior looking forward to summer vacation on the beach in Malibu, California, who wants to hang out with the boys, and wants to learn how to surf, even though she’s a girl. Before you can say Gidget, Florence becomes involved with the cool boys on the beach. There’s surfer guru Kanaka (Thomas Gibson), surfers Yo-Yo (Nick Cornish), Provolone (Andrew Levitas), and B-movie actress Bettina Barnes (Kimberley Davies) who’s hiding out in a beach house from her studio that’s supposedly haunted.

Soon Ambrose is dubbed “Chicklet” by her on-again, off-again boyfriend Starcat (Nicholas Brendon), who suggests that she’s not even a real chick since she seems not to be interested in sex. She begins to take surfing lessons from Kanaka, and before long, a series of gruesome murders occurs. Florence becomes a suspect in these murders, as she experiences puzzling blackouts where she adopts another personality, that of Ann Bowman, an angry, lewd bondage enthusiast who makes Kanaka her willing submissive slave.

In this film, there are so many send-ups, primarily of 50s and 60s stock types and psycho killer movies, that the viewer gets lost in the mashup. Busch comes in as police captain Monica Stark who is charged with investigating the murders. It soon becomes known that Stark had an affair with Kanaka years ago before making captain.

The cast is extensive here; there’s Florence’s tightly wound mother Ruth (Beth Broderick) who plays her Donna Reed persona to the hilt. Even Amy Adams is a hanger-on among the beach denizens of this Southern California community. This certainly was one of her first film roles, and I had trouble initially identifying her. There’s also a Swedish exchange student named Lars (Matt Keesler) who is living with the Forrests.

The film works as high camp and it’s not necessary to think too much of its exalted aims; it’s just very funny as it pokes fun at these genres with a very light touch.

The interviews after the film were informative. Ben Brantley, originally from The New York Times, interviewed King and Busch. Busch appeared as himself (not in drag) and was dressed all in white. Busch mentioned that the film was adapted from his 1987 off-off Broadway play and that it was determined that more of a plot had to be inserted into the 2000 film adaptation. Busch also stated that the play was formless; there was no serial murder plot which was now added to the King-directed film. The use of Ambrose was mentioned by either King or Busch as they looked at many actresses for the role of Florence Forrest. I wanted to ask a question concerning Adams being in the film, but I lost my chance. However, her casting was addressed by both King and Busch. The director mentioned how she was a good dancer and that in one scene where there was some sort of dance competition among the beach kids, her better dancing skills had to be toned down a bit to suit her character.

The news out of Washington these days is so awful that I don’t know where to begin commenting on every horrible story. The Jeffrey Epstein scandal just gets weirder and weirder every day, what with the bizarre announcement today that convicted sex offender Ghislaine Maxwell, who was serving a 20-year prison sentence in a maximum security facility, was moved to a lower-security federal prison camp in Texas. This move comes a week after Maxwell met in private with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche at the U.S. Attorney’s office in Tallahassee. Details of that meeting have suspiciously not been made public. If this latest action by Dump’s private justice department doesn’t seem a bit suspicious, then we are all morons for not thinking there’s a rotting fish here.

Family members of Virginia Guiffre – one of the women who accused Epstein of sex trafficking and who died by suicide earlier this year – and other accusers of Maxwell and Epstein reacted to the news with “horror and outrage,” saying that it “smacks of a cover-up.” Cover-up indeed. They accused this president of sending a message that “pedophiles deserve preferential treatment and their victims do not matter.” When will Dump’s enablers finally sit down and realize how awful their Supreme Leader is and start putting up some resistance to him? I wonder if that day will ever come.

Have a good weekend, everyone.

And so it went!

Here is former Times critic Ben Brantley and Charles Busch next to him on the right.

Here is Robert Lee King on the left, Brantley in the middle, and Busch on the right.