Hippies and horror seem to go hand-in-hand during the 1970s. So for today's Hippie Hotties, let's see what kind of crazy things were threatening hippies in the 1974 film Welcome to Arrow Beach.
The movie is about a hippie girl wandering around on a California beach as one does. She is picked up by a Korean war veteran who happens to live nearby in a large California mansion with his sister. That all sounds pretty groovy. Nope! Something mysterious is afoot.
Laurence Harvey directed this movie and starred in it as the leading man. Joanna Pettet played his sister and Meg Foster plays Robbin Stanley, our bright-eyed hippie chick who goes totally nude from breasts to bush as she frolics on the beach.
At first, our leading lady is told that the vet's sister has mental illness issues. However, she soon suspects there is real danger there that can't be chalked up just to mental illness. Spoiler alert: the vet and his sister are cannibals and they are hungry for Meg Foster!
Welcome to Arrow Beach was directed by Laurence Harvey, the actor known for starring in movies like BUTterfield 8, The Alamo, The Running Man, Darling, The Magic Christian, and The Manchurian Candidate. So he was a very accomplished power player in Hollywood!
His directorial debut was in 1963 when he made The Ceremony which was only a decade before this film. Welcome to Arrow Beach was director Laurence Harvey's last film. He succumbed to an illness that was so bad that he had trouble editing the film because he was in pain as he sat down on chairs. He edited this movie squatting down on the carpet!
This film goes by several titles such as Murder Mansion, Tender Flesh, and Cold Storage, but most people know it as Welcome to Arrow Beach.
The film was not that well-received with the LA Times calling it "tedious" and it became relegated to corny midnight movie status. It's always interesting to me when someone who isn't in the counter-culture tries their hand at making a story that has hippies characters or ideas. It usually misses the mark.
Thankfully, the hippiedom of this movie is simply used to get one character out of her element (the California air?) and into the house of horrors that make the rest of the movie. In that way, hippiedom barely plays a role. Meg Foster's character is a flower child who is wandering around nude on the beach and hitchhiking. In that way, the movie is a lot like other hippie horror films from the 70s, having villains exploit the naivete of hippies for their murderous desires.
