Back to the Beach (1987) on Netflix
Frankie and Annette, who left the beach life behind for Ohio, stop in California on the way to Hawaii to visit their daughter Sandi. She has been hiding her surfer boyfriend, Michael.
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- Netflix3.3/5
- IMDb6.0/103,786 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes71%
Trailer
Plot summary
Frankie was the Big Kahuna, a California surfing star, before he married Annette and moved to Ohio, where he sells cars and she shops. Their son, Bobby, is fourteen and in open rebellion. On an early spring trip to Hawaii the family stops in Los Angeles to visit their twenty-year-old daughter, Sandi, who lives in an apartment above a bait shop and has not told them that a local surfer, Michael, shares it. When Sandi spots her parents, she throws Michael, his clothes and his surfboard out the window into the ocean. Frankie and Bobby go looking for him, and on the beach Frankie knocks over the surfboards of a punk gang led by Zed. At Daddy O's, the club where Sandi waits tables, Annette sees that Dick Dale and the Del Tones are playing.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Back to the Beach (1987)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Annette Funicello began showing symptoms of multiple sclerosis during the making of Back to the Beach, so some of her scenes had to be adapted to her condition; she kept the illness's true cause hidden, and it was her last starring role before she died in 2013.
- Seventeen writers worked on the screenplay, among them Jeff Buhia & Steve Zacharias, Robert Kaufman, David Obst and Bill Norton Jr., at a cost estimated at $2 million in writers' fees.
- Aimee Mann said in 2001 that her soundtrack song "Sign of Love" was "absolute crap" and that she had recorded it as a favour for a producer friend.
- Writer-director James Komack said he and Paramount production chief Ned Tanen agreed on a story about a middle-age marital life crisis, but the studio wanted to camp it up and Komack felt that wasn't necessary.
- Paramount was attracted to the project but disliked Avalon's script; because Orion Pictures owned the rights to the original AIP beach party movies, Paramount wanted an entirely original screenplay not based on any prior beach movies.
