The Beast That Killed Women

Delores Carlos and Byron Mabe play a couple,who is visiting a Miami nudist camp.Unfortunately for them an escaped gorilla chooses to show up on grounds of camp and start killing female nudists,one woman to be precise.How the beast in gorilla suit escaped or why it's attacking nudists in their grass huts at night is never explained though we're given a soundless scene near the end of the film where the cops arrest an unnamed woman with a large cage in her home.I have seen my share of bad horror movies and "The Beast That Killed Women" is no exception.It has tons of naked flesh,but no full-frontal nudity.The acting is terrible,the plot is extremely dull and the beast looks laughable.Still the scenes with gorilla are strangely amusing.3 out of 10.

The Beast That Killed Women (1965)

** (out of 4)

The setting is a nudist camp in Miami where the members have a swell time spending their days walking around naked, swimming, square dancing and playing a variety of other sports. All of this happiness quickly turns to terror when a killer gorilla shows up and starts killing people.

THE BEAST THAT KILLED WOMEN is probably one of the better known releases from Something Weird Video because it qualifies as one of the worst movies ever made but also one of the most entertaining in a so-bad-it's-good kind of way. While watching this movie the first thing that came into my mind was how much it must have sucked wanting to see nudity back in the day because you would have to submit yourself to these types of movies. The next thing that came into my mind is how thin the entire plot is but this was to be expected because the only real goal here was to show nude bodies and there's no question that we get a lot of that.

Again, everything in this movie is pretty awful from the acting to the directing to the plot to the horrible score but in all honesty no one is watching this for "that" stuff. The movie contains non-stop nudity and it's often done is such childish ways that you can't help but laugh. Just check out the first real bits of nudity where the camera pretty much just stays in place while naked people walk in front of it. I guess you can say the director was an equal opportunist nudist because it's woman, man, woman and then man again. There are countless scenes of people just walking in front of the camera and the most hilarious moment comes when there's a towel on top of a wall for some reason and two women must jump in order to try and get it. Oh, then let's not forget that the women sleep on bunk beds and near the end when the gorilla is running loose this gives them a reason to get into the same bed.

Speaking of the gorilla, the man-in-a-gorilla suit routine is never scary here and in fact it's going to get more laughs than anything else. I'm not sure what actor was inside the suit but I'm curious as to what drugs were in his system because this is one wild and crazy gorilla. The outfit is obviously fake and they never try to hide this. As you can tell, there are a lot of bad things with this film but at just 60-minutes the film moves rather good and there's no question that there are enough laughs here to keep you entertained as long as you don't take it too serious.

The "nudie-cutie" is without a doubt one of the campiest genres in the history of American cinema. Prevented by the censors from doing anything stronger, 60's exploitation filmmakers like David Freiedman, Herschel Gordon Lewis, and Barry Mahon resorted to making "nature documentaries"--basically home movies shot at nudist camps (although the actual nudists were usually told to take a hike and attractive and voluptuous nude models were put in their place). Naturally, the acting and production values were atrocious and the films were much more silly than erotic. It is always refreshing to see naked women before the modern era of institutionalized anorexia and silicone implants, but you'd do better with the later 70's sexploitation films like the "roughies" or the "ghoulies" which often featured the same kinds of women but were far sleazier and had actual (and often mind-warping) plots. You see one nudie-cutie film on the other hand you've seen them all.

If you MUST see one though of these movies though, this is a good choice. It ranks somewhere between "The House on Bare Mountain" and similar "The Monster at Camp Sunshine", but unlike both those earlier films it is in color. It really should be called "The Beast that Killed Woman" as only one woman is killed (and probably owing to censorship, she is fully clothed at the time). The beast also throws a guy in a lake and most of the movie is taken up with the police interviewing this second "victim" in his hospital bed or with various nude or semi-nude women discussing how scared they are and whether they should leave the resort. My favorite scene is where a woman is screaming for help and one of these bimbos responds by jumping out of her top bunk and hopping into the lower bunk with her friend (yeah, that makes a lot more sense than calling the police). The "beast" by the way turns out to be an escaped gorilla (or rather a man in a very unconvincing gorilla suit). What is a murderous escaped gorilla doing in a Florida nudist resort? You know, they never really do say. Oh well.

This movie is some kind of a underestimated classic. I'm sure of that. Man chasing naked women in a suit of gorilla - whoa! The acting is so bad, that you cannot even blame the people that they can't play. It's just unbearably funny. It's edited from a bunch of totally idiotic scenes, with nonsense dialogues, fatal lightning..., oh, let's just say that everything in here is very, very bad. Just take the scene of a "belly dance": see how they're clapping to the rhythm, while the director is giving them signs from beyond the camera - you have to see it to believe. And that's the case - it's so campy that you can just love it or leave it. I loved it. Great comedy for a bad mood.

Some movies just aren't made to impress and to sweep any awards. They are made purely to please a certain audience. And for its certain audience, at its time, this must had been simple a good fun, bad movie, with some nudity to it.

It's an sexploitation flick from the '60's but that doesn't mean that it's a very daring or exciting one. Seems that for legal reasons they were not allowed to film people below the waist and when they did they only showed the backside of people. So never any full frontal nudity in this movie, which is strange, since this entire movie is set at a nudist camp.

And what a silly nudist camp it is. They are dancing, singing and swimming together and all seem to have a very jolly time. All of the girls are very young and beautiful ones, which is of course not realistic at all, considering what type of people normally attend nudist camps. But beware though of the beast that is lurking in the bushes...no woman is safe from his great strength and extreme cunningness.

There is of course very little story to this all and the story that there is, is all real ridicules. It's simply a extremely poorly done movie, with zero production value. Not sure if this was actually a serious attempt to crossover the monster genre with a sexploitation flick. The end result is hard to take serious as one, anyway.

It was obviously a very cheap movie. All of the camera-shots are extremely static and mostly consists out of people entering the frame or uttering some lines. Non of the people involved were real actors, at least they did not acted that way. It was simply horrendous. It was also extremely hard to understand what they were saying, which was due to some extreme poor sound quality at times. It was fun though at times to hear the crew talking in the background. An obvious unintentional mistake.

But well, you just don't watch a this sort of movie for its innovating, high technical qualities, it's brilliant acting or clever story. You watch it purely to have some fun with and because it's all so bad and extremely silly, you just can't help but to enjoy this movie. It doesn't make it a good movie by any means but it at least makes it a fun one to watch. And luckily it's only just an hour long so you don't feel like you are wasting too much time with it.

4/10

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