Free for you to view on Hulu: Beach Party

As a tribute to Annette Funicello, here is the one... the only... the original... Beach Party. (And no, I didn't remember that Robert Cummings and Dorothy Malone got top billing, either.) If you can take your eyes off Annette -- look for Vincent Price in a cameo role.

Lena Dunham talks about her "first time"

The lovely and talented Lena Dunham made me laugh out loud with this video in support of President Barack Obama. At least, I laughed until, for the second time in less than a week, I was reminded that I cast my first vote in a Presidential election all the way back in 1972, for George McGovern. God, I feel old. As Vincent Price once said after he realized that, out of all the people in an old movie he was watching on TV, he was the only one still alive: "I put down the drink -- and picked up the bottle."

The Price of Poe

Roy Rogers isn’t the only luminary who’s getting a day-long tribute this month on Turner Classic Movies. This Friday, Aug. 10, Vincent Price will be remembered with a mini-retrospective that includes five – count ‘em, five! – of the stylish, small-budget Edgar Allan Poe adaptations Price famously filmed in the ‘60s with director Roger Corman: House of Usher (6:30 pm EDT), The Pit and the Pendulum (8 pm EDT), Tales of Terror (9:30 pm EDT), Masque of the Red Death (11:15 pm EDT) and the Tomb of Ligeia (1 am EDT).

Pit arguably is the spookiest of the lot, but I must confess to my preference for Masque, if only because it features the va-va-voom Hazel Court, whose heaving decolletage loomed large in my adolescent fantasies. Tales of Terror, a three-part anthology, contains an episode that's a splendidly seriocomic gem, a tongue-in-cheeky mash-up of Poe’s The Black Cat and The Cask of Amontillado featuring a roly-poly Peter Lorre as an alcoholic ne’er-do-well who gets medieval on a wine connoisseur (a self-parodying Price) when the latter makes moves on the ne’er-do-well’s improbably voluptuous wife (Joyce Jameson).

Also worth TiVoing: The Last Man on Earth (3:30 pm EDT), a budget-challenged version of the Richard Matheson story that recently inspired a rather more lavish sci-fi flick starring Will Smith.