Back to the Beach (1987)

Years after their beach party adventures, Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello are married and living a doldrum life in Ohio. During a layover in Los Angeles, they meet up with their adult daughter Lori Loughlin and find their beach fever reignited. Only having a basic knowledge of who Frankie and Annette were back then, I still remember when this film came out and had a passing desire to see it as one of my first experiences of film reboots. I probably shouldn’t have bothered. Maybe in a different mood, it might have hit better, but it essentially is just wall to wall clichés of irritating corniness with strange references (like Annette being obsessed with Jif peanut butter), lame ‘punks’, and annoying narration by the king of the punks, their young son Demian Slade. What little it has going for it is an earnestness and one of the strangest mix of cameos committed to film, from Bob Denver to O.J. Simpson to Pee-wee Herman to Fishbone.