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Teen Beach Movie (2013) is one of those films that people love or hate. It’s an outwardly silly film starring occasionally inconsistent teenage actors, packed full of musical numbers, containing intensely obvious editing inconsistencies, plot holes, and a thin storyline. But does that make it bad, or were all of those things done intentionally to create a fun film that honors a film genre many have all but forgotten, or never knew existed?

The “beach movie” is a thing of the past - so much so that a large portion of the millennial audience of Teen Beach Movie doesn’t know what the filmmakers were drawing from. After all, the last “true” beach movie was filmed over 45 years ago.

Beach party films were a film sub-genre popular in the mid-1960s, beginning with the Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello hit Beach Party in 1963. A few dozen titles in total were categorized into the beach party genre during the 1960s. Most of them were low-budget B-films, almost all were comedies, and they relied on silly plots, teen trends, romantic storylines, musical acts, and a tongue-in-cheek style of innuendo comedy. They were dumb, bright, colorful, and musical. They appealed to the carefree spirit of people during the 1960s and found wild, unexpected success with audiences.

With that as its criteria, Disney’s Teen Beach Movie is pretty much right on the money as a legitimate beach party film.

The title of the film, which receives frequent criticism across Internet discussion boards as “lazy” and “obvious” is on-par with the titles of 1960s beach movies, and is doubly representative of this film as it’s not only a teen beach movie itself, but the plot centers around the two main characters getting stuck inside an actual 1960s teen beach movie.

What many list as the failures of Teen Beach Movie - including overacting, absurdity, and inconsistency - are trademarks of the genre. Having one shot where people are dancing on the beach, followed by a shot where those same people are getting out of a car holding beach balls isn’t bad editing, it’s intentional. The beach party genre is the film definition of whimsy, and attention to entertainment over continuity is part of its style.

Teen Beach Movie is aware of its absurdity, and goes so far as to call itself out in a number of scenes. Mac (Maia Mitchell) frequently talks about how nothing makes sense. The fourth wall is broken at the end of the film by the evil henchman (Kevin Chamberlin) when he is told he’s in a movie. And various performances (like Grace Phipps and Garrett Clayton’s facial-expression-head-moving-sequence near the end of the film) is a high-five to the silly filmmaking tactics of the genre’s past.

As director Jeffrey Hornaday said in an interview;

“What we decided to do was to try to recreate the feeling you have when you think back on [beach films], which is a sense of whimsy, enthusiasm and this kind of magical feel.”