The Last Beach

The best pre-1965 Beach Boys album featured their brilliant number one single "I Get Around," as well as other standout cuts in the beautifully sad "Wendy," "Little Honda" (one of their best hot rod tunes), and their remake of the late-'50s doo wop classic "Hushabye." Plus the nostalgic "All Summer Long."

Sister Cristina (Florinda Bolkan) plays a nun who takes the teenage girls in her care to a remote house where they rehearse A Midsummer Night's Dream. Three thugs show up, brutally raping and terrorizing the girls, killing one by raping her with a cane, until Bolkan renounces her teachings and seeks bloody revenge.

Dungeness, a headland on the Kentish coast of England, is a strange place. It's home to two nuclear power stations, one of which remains operational. The site is also a protected nature reserve and a residential area, complete with a couple of pubs and a "mystical" gift shop. Most of the houses are wooden and ramshackle, home to fishermen. Rusted railway tracks stretch into the distance. Broken-down boats and debris are strewn across the shingle and scrub. You'll also find the "listening ears" of Denge here, a set of alien concrete structures, or "acoustic mirrors," erected in the 1930s as aircraft detection systems. (They failed miserably.) Walking around it all feels terribly remote and deserted, like some apocalyptic scene straight out of a JG Ballard novel. It's easy to see why Oliver Ho was drawn to the place.

It feels weird to call this a great record–it's so slight. But it's perfect and full of pleasure; it does what it sets out to do almost without a bad second. And what does it set out to do? To convey the troubled innocence of the Beach Boys through a time of attractive but perilous psychedelic sturm und drang.