If you want to see a young Beau Bridges shimmy and shake to a groovy 60s soundtrack, go rent Village of the Giants. It delivers that and oh, so much more. Beau is part of a gang of rampaging teenagers who grow to incredible size and start terrorizing a small town. But they do it in a groovy way because hello, everything was groovy back then.

We are introduced to Beau Bridges, who plays Fred, and his delinquent friends after the car they’re riding in breaks down and a crazy mud fight/make out session ensues in the pouring rain. (This is the first sign that things are only going to get wackier; the other sign is that this is a Bert I. Gordon feature, which means that there will be giant creatures and split screen special effects somewhere in the movie.) The muddy teenagers head to the nearest town for help or just to be jerks to the local populace and run into Genius, a very smart little boy played by Ron Howard, and his older brother Mike, played by teen idol Tommy Kirk. Genius is quite the mad scientist and has synthesized a substance—which they call Goop—that increases an animal’s size tenfold when ingested (thank you, Bert I. Gordon). Up to that point the only test subjects had been a flock of ducks and the hapless family dog that get supersized. The geese end up as the main stars of a town wide barbecue; the dog escapes that grisly fate.

Fred and his cohorts realize that Goop would be worth a lot of money so they scheme to steal it from Genius. Since this is the 60s and they are teenagers, they experiment by eating some of the Goop and start growing up, up, up until they bust out of their clothes. And their underclothes, as it turns out, prompting them to fashion a new wardrobe out of old theater curtains and costumes. The result is perfectly tailored, shabby chic, toga-like outfits with plenty of cleavage real estate for the girls. The bad boys and girls make the theater their headquarters and demand food and drink from the town, lest they start rampaging like Godzilla. In one memorable scene, the overgrown misfits start dancing in the town square while horrified citizens are helpless to stop the go-go madness. One giant gal grabs a hapless (lucky?) guy from the crowd who has to clutch on to her formidable brassiere while she shimmies and shakes and threatens everyone within a 100-foot radius should those bra straps snap. Genius finally manages to make an antidote to Goop and administer to the giants, who are then run out of town, regular-sized and still dressed in their theatrical costumes.

Whether this movie was a ham-fisted cautionary tale about juvenile delinquency or a warning about scientific experimentation is up to interpretation. It falls under the ‘giant terror’ category of sci-fi movies from the 50s and 60s, where oversized humans and animals wreaked havoc across the country. Village of the Giants is one of the campier examples of the genre but still a lot of fun, if only for the dancing sequences.