The Monster of Camp Sunshine or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Nature

This movie is one of those movies that should have been better. The basic plot has two room mates going off to a nudist camp for the weekends. One is a nurse at a research lab where an accident produces a nasty mix of chemicals that turns rats mean. The creator knowing its a bad thing, but through a series of contrivances the stuff ends up in a stream by the camp where it turns the caretaker in to an ax wielding maniac. The film turns surreal as a stock footage army arrives to kill the monster and it ends with everyone getting naked and wandering off to live happily ever after.

The pacing of this film is really slow. Had it not been, and had it not turned stupid once the monster appears this could have been a good nudist thriller. The people are mostly real and the plotting isn't that bad, its just the sort of thing that they tried to... I don't know what and messed it all up.

I do have to say that the photography and in the New York City scenes in particular is glorious black and white. This is a wonderful record of the city circa 1964. There is a sequence involving a photo shoot on a rooftop that is stunning and I'm tempted to print out one of the frames when and if I get a DVD ROM in my computer.

I bought this film as a double feature dvd and thought it would be good for a few laughs. I put it on while friends were over ( thinking we would skip through it) and we were amazed by the clever opening credits that looked kind of like something from Terry Gilliam. The opening scene is quite surreal. It opens in a cool New York apartment shared by 2 60's swingers. One of them a Nurse and the other a fashion model who also serves as our narrator. They are in bunk beds smoking and using the coolest hanging ashtrays you'll ever see. The model tells of the dangerous fates they did not know that were ahead of them and the music in the scene is dark and creepy and amazingly playing on the models record player. The nurse asks the model to change the record, and she puts on some kind of marching music. I cannot give this scene justice, you must see it for yourself. What really surprised us was the ending. The Battle for Camp Sunshine is a true epic on film making.The epic military scenes and touching ending make this a classic horror-nudist-war movie almost anyone could enjoy. The nudity could hardly offend anyone, there is very little of it. The look of the actors and the excellent cinematography make this great viewing if you are in the mood for something like this. And you must be if you are reading this comment. I say go see it!

I thought this would be just another nudie-cutie with a lot of stock footage to fill in between the nude scenes...I was wrong. This film, at times, looks as if it were a film directed by Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen, Brian DePalma, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Russ Meyer and Guy Maddin. I know this sounds crazy, but just watch it and you'll see what I mean.

Incredibly stupid plot, beautifully done. The black and white cinematography is great considering the total lack of funds to make a "Hollywood" film.

This qualifies as "so bad, its good". The 1960s doco sound track, the strategically placed items of girl and boy bits ... so seminal, Blake Edwards must have been influenced by it for A Shot in the Dark!

Hilarious... 75 minutes well spent.

I'm a big fan of naked women, but even I don't need this much

nudity. THE MONSTER OF CAMP SUNSHINE takes place in a

nudist camp and, almost exclusively, involves nudists (who we are

informed in a pre-credits card, are not monsters) who are

terrorized by a dopey guy who has drank some nasty lake water

and turned into a threatening dopey guy.

Most of MONSTER is very dull, directed without any sense of

pacing or style. Obviously, people at a drive-in in 1964 didn't care

about that, they were excited to see the nudists. They certainly get

what they paid for, with lots and lots of women disrobing and

strolling around the idyllic Camp Sunshine. This was probably a

gas at some point, but now it's very tame, and eventually one gets

tired of it. Too much of a good thing takes all the fun out of it.

There are some highlights for bad movie fans. A unknowing

nurse is pushed out of an office window...by some crazed killer

mice. They even go so far to have guys throwing mice at the poor

woman from off camera. Then, after the monstrous Hugo has

fallen under the spell of that contaminated water (it also got to

those mice), MONSTER looses all semblance of reality and

becomes a bizarre montage of naked bodies, and stock footage of

various armies and military explosions. There's so much of it, you

might think that the editor accidentally forgot what movie he was

cutting. Then, when the craziness dies down (and there certainly

is a lot of it), the nudists get back to doing what they do best. This

includes the one of them who just lost a brother, and another who

is a doctor (He takes off his white jacket to reveal nothing

underneath).

MONSTER OF CAMP SUNSHINE is a very bad movie, but it rarely

offers the sort of z-grade thrills you'd hope to see in something of

this caliber. If you fast forward a whole lot, you might be able to

enjoy it.