The Beast That Killed Women

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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The Beast that Killed Women is terrible and terribly dull movie about a gorilla, we'll pretend that we buy its not a man in a bad gorilla suit, killing women at a nudist camp. This is painful as people wander around, play volleyball and do nothing for the first quarter of the film other than be naked. Day turns to night and everyone puts on their clothes (?) for get together. After turning in the gorilla shows up drags a woman out of her hut, takes her to a field and bounces twice on her stomach and kills her.

Morning comes and as the body is discovered I turn the DVD off because this is just painful.

A man recuperating in a hospital recounts how he got there when an ape terrorized a nudist camp. This was marginally better then "Monster at Camp Sunshine", the other feature on Something Weird's double-feature DVD. Obviously, this film only exists to show flesh, and don't get me wrong, the movie is pretty damn bad. But at just an hour it's not THAT awful. Thanks in part to being Juliet Anderson's first film role. Juliet of course would become a porn star in the 80's thanks to her 'Aunt Peg' character, and roles in other Golden Age porn classics.

My Grade: D+

DVD Extras: Double-Bill with "The Monster of Camp Sunshine"; 9 Shorts ( Bring 'em back nude, Expose of the Nudist Racket, Nude Ranch, Beauty and the Beast, Back to Nature, Nudist Fashion show, and 3 intermissions) ; Gallery of Exploitation art; Vintage Drive-in intermission; Theatrical Trailer; Trailers for "Eves on Skis", "Goldilocks and the Three Bares", "Nudes on Tiger Reef", "Nudist Life", and "Pussycat Paradise"

Easter Egg: Highlight Jesse James Drive-In for a bonus Trailer for "Girls Come Too"

Eye Candy: It's mostly set at a nudist camp..duh, so loads of breasts and buns, only bushes are trees tho

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.

First of all, I was actually able to watch the full thing without turning it off or pausing it, which is good, I guess. Anyway, in my own opinion, it was a great film, despite the fact it lacked decent acting and the volume didn't stay consistent.

Most of the actors seemed like they could do better if they just acted as they would if cameras weren't rolling. There was one scene which had people clapping, but the claps that could be heard did not match up with the actors hand movements. There was a few bits where children (or something else) can be heard making noise, yet it could be heard outside of a building, and inside at the same volume. Furthermore, some bits didn't have speech and only music and various, seemingly random, noises can be heard.

Nevertheless, the plot, albeit not too creative, was half-decent, and it did manage to make it look like these people were actual nudists (some of the actors are nudists, which helped, a lot). The film did a great job at knowing what it was, and what it was doing. It never seemed to be taking itself too seriously, which is what makes it so good. Matter of fact, one character talks about how the 'beast' could be a man in a suit, which it, as we all know, was.

All in all, the lack of quality actually makes it an enjoyable film. It may not be everyone's cup of tea, so to speak, but I'd recommend it to anyone who likes B-Movies.