Horror of Party Beach

I originally drew this illustration in 2003. I also colored it back then - but I had only just begun to learn Photoshop, and the results weren't great. My memory is a little fuzzy but I'm pretty sure I posted the original version on my website and probably left it there for a couple of years... but ultimately I decided I wasn't happy with the colors and removed it. I don't think I ever posted it on Deviant Art before.

The drawing itself was adequate and it's a fun little tribute to a fun little movie: "The Horror of Party Beach". So I always intended to go back and re-color this piece some day.
Well, I finally did, this weekend.

The original version was colored predictably bright and sunny. This time around I thought it would be funny to color it like a dark, cloudy day, with a storm brewing on the horizon... The worst kind of day you could possibly imagine for a girl to go sunbathing. Haha.

Back in the 1990's I owned a rare videotape of "Horror of Party Beach" that was all fuzzy and muddy. The poor picture quality was so grainy it looked like all the beach girls were covered with zits and the monsters were so completely drowned in darkness that you could barely even see them. But I assumed, "This was a super low budget movie... That's probably as good as it EVER looked..."

But eventually I got the DVD released by Dark Sky Films [link] ...and was absolutely shocked by its crystal clear picture quality. All the sudden those 1960's bikini girls looked smooth and attractive and the monsters were perfectly visible in the night-scenes... and the whole movie became much more fun to watch. In the years since, it has become one of those cheapie monster flicks I have returned to and re-watched many times.

I will never try to convince anyone that "Horror of Party Beach" is a great film or an unrecognized classic. But it is FUN and that is all that matters to me.