cult film freak: ENDLESS SUZANNE SOMERS AT JOHN CARPENTER'S 'ZUMA BEACH'

Suzanne Somers in ZUMA BEACH 1978 Rates: ***1/2

TV Movies of the Week reigned in the 1970's before cable and the video rental boom, always filling time decently enough... And at ZUMA BEACH, escapism is pretty fine, like with Kimberly Beck as Cathy, new girl in town and cousin of Rosanna Arquette’s Southern California local, Beverly, who thinks apish Steven Keats, as car parking shyster Jerry McCabe, is a fox… so goes the 1970’s… But the mainline centers on a singer named Bonnie Katt: wherein Suzanne Somers, after teasing Richard Dreyfuss in AMERICAN GRAFFITI, blowing up in MAGNUM FORCE and right at the beginning of her game-changing breakthrough on THREE’S COMPANY, dons a sexy one-piece bikini, making the beach her own strutting sandbox...

Suzanne Somers

With a breezy teleplay written by horror icon John Carpenter the same year he’d serve up PJ Soles a HALLOWEEN demise; here she plays Nancy, equally promiscuous as her radical cinema starlet, fawned over by a passive young man (Mark Wheeler), related to a mentoring Keats, and she'd rather give it up to pre-TERMINATOR Michael Biehn's popular lifeguard anyway… ZUMA is full of eclectic pop culture and doesn’t even realize it yet (including Tanya Roberts)...

Rosanna Arquette

“There is a God,” one smitten guy says. “Yeah,” adds another. “And there goes His daughter...”

Thus the mortals are under Suzanne's spell – the boys for obvious reasons, and the girls either look up to her experience and laidback aura, or don’t know why she’s around at all, stealing their own curvy thunder… Yet as much as other guys try, only Keats piques her interest... As a former entrepreneur, both are dodging more promising careers...

PJ Soles & Michael Biehn in Zuma Beach

Eventually, Somer’s Katt tells everyone who she really is, and why she’s taking a break from the music biz as we experience one mellow day instead of an entire chaotic weekend so the characters mean only as much as their lightweight, melodramatic problems, each with a resolution right around the sandy corner...

Like a young Timothy Hutton as a cigarette-smoking junior lifeguard (mentored by beach MC Les Lannom), who, two years shy of the Oscar-winning ORDINARY PEOPLE, scrutinizes everyone, including several shy fellas seeking creative ways to hook up with the aforementioned bikini-clad beauties — while everyone basks in the groovy 1970's sunshine within the titular dream haven.