Before Frankie Avalon was dealing with the kind of bikinis one sees on the beach in those Beach Party films, his agent got him to this turkey of a film where before the Bikini atoll was a site for the atomic bomb testing it was a small contested bit of real estate in the Pacific War.Tab Hunter leads a squad of marines including Avalon with Jim Backus as a gunnery sergeant on Captain Scott Brady's submarine on a mission. Said mission is to find a sunken American submarine near Bikini Atoll and blow it up before the Japanese take it and find that newfangled sonar it has.Among the perks are some lovely Polynesian beauties that some of the men indulge. Avalon does not, instead he has these silly out of place dream sequences where we get a couple of songs.It all gets done after a fashion. Operation Bikini was made on the cheap in black and white, the better to take advantage of some real Pacific combat footage.One really silly excuse for a war film.

1. the new B&W sequences are sharp and clear 2. Bachus is repulsive as usual 3. Tab's dialog laughable: "That's what he said when we left-like 3 hours ago." 4. some location work showing a seaplane entering the water and taking off is credible. Then the Jap soldiers get rousted out of a tent and march into the jungle. 5. Showing Frankie in his berth sans shirt while dreaming was cool. 6. Some Japanese extras got some work. 7. Tab's girlie-fight was wasted in costume. 8. The blocking and dialog is so bad it makes the acting seem OK (kidding). ("Watch out for the girls") 9. Frankie is a knockout in A shirt listening to Crosby doing an impression of his dad. 10. the songs are forgettable-thank God. 10. But the cinematography is great !

new words need to be invented to adequately describe just how bad this film is. to call it stupid is a compliment. i just watched this on turner classic movies. my god what an embarrassment, the most profound sentiment it raised in me was to hope that all involved with making it were severely beaten afterward. i was rooting for the japs. i'm having trouble filling ten lines of text for this review because lets face it how many different ways can you say horrible? three more lines to go. this movie is terrible, this movie is an insult to ed wood, this movie should be burned and every participant still alive should be hunted down like simon wiesenthal on a nazi then have their DNA eradicated from the gene pool. stick a sharp pencil in your eye before watching this horrid crapulence

1st watched 6/16/2002 - 4 out of 10(Dir-Anthony Carras): Unfocused war movie that tries to throw in video clips from Frankie Avalon and dancing girls in bikini's at the end to lighten it up? If it would have been a war adventure from beginning to end it would have been better. This film is basically about a special mission being sent to Bikini Island in the south Pacific to rescue a sunken U.S. submarine(for what reason I wasn't sure). A miniature romance begins with Tab Hunter and an island girl, but she gets killed in the next scene, and supposedly Frankie is enticed in his dreams by a seductive island girl and is tempted by her in his song while his girl is at home waiting for him(of course this is just a setup for his singing - he never encounters the temptation). Silly little things like this, and Jim Backus trying to throw in lame humor when his character really doesn't seem like he should have any, is also silly. This movie reminds me of something the studio chopped up and sold for what it wasn't about, to try and make some money(which I hope it didn't). Bottom line this is a lame attempt at a war movie with a couple of lame songs song by Mr. Avalon.