Cosmic Children is a typical 70s style surf film – boring, hilarious, wonderful, drab narration, bizarre soundtrack, too long… It begins with this cryptic quote: The Cosmic Children are the dynamic, space age surfers of the 1960’s who “feel the juice” of the ocean’s swells.
The movie is mainly 80 minutes of your standard surf clips accompanied by useless narrations such as, “Here’s Jeff Hakman dropping in,” “J Riddle…in the tube,” and “Corky Carroll riding a wave.” Lots of general, obvious statements. But again, 70s surf films were like that, and usually had the 80-90 minute film length. Surf films were still kind of a new art form at the time and they used hollywood movies as a model. Luckily, they’ve refined themselves since then!
The soundtrack is rife with down-home country jams and ethereal, flutey jazz jams. How did the flute make it into so much mainstream music in the 70s? But then there are some sweet rock-n-roll classics from Cream, The Rolling Stones and so on in there too. Eclectic and not at all cohesive.
It’s a good film to have on in the background I suppose. But unless it’s free, watch Five Summer Stories instead. Though still VERY MUCH a 70s surf film, FSS is superior.
I can’t find a preview of Cosmic Children on YouTube for you, but you can watch what The Surf Network has, if you like. It’s not so much a preview as just the first two minutes of the movie – which has no surfing, just a bunch of 70s kids on the beach, milling around, totally out of their gourds.