User reviews

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.

Camp Sunshine is a nudist spot. A group of models are planning to vacation there. Unbeknownst to them, there is a monster lurking there which was created when the groundskeeper drinks water contaminated by a scientist's experiment.

First this is a sexploitation. At the beginning, the movie promises nudity and it delivers. Second, it's bad. The acting is bad. The production is poor. The mishmash of ideas is wrong-headed. Third, it's a monster movie but it's poorly executed. It's almost made as a parody or camp. The monster looks bad. Lastly, it tries to be a comedy. From the silent picture motif to the title to some bizarre scenes, this tries to be funny. Of course, non of it is actually funny but it is easy to make fun of it. Here's the deal. This is a bad movie but it is still interesting at times. There is one nice picturesque scene with the Empire State Building in the background. This is bad but I've seen worst.

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.

A nurse and fashion model, sharing an apartment, rail against lab testing on mice, like the air headed bimbos they are. After the rats attach the nurse, they take a trip to a nudist camp (the women, not the rats), only to be terrorized by a fat retarded janitor. Unlike the better "Best that Killed Women", this one is totally inept and taking forever for ANYthing to happen, a true chore to sit through. One good note neither the Director, nor the cast made ANYthing EVER again. So at least there's some kind of happy ending to be had after all.

My Grade: F

DVD Extras: On a double-Bill with "The Beast that Killed Women"; 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; Trailers for "The Beast that Killed Women", "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

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 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!

Vinegar Syndrome had a great overstock sale during the recent Labor Day weekend. If you don't know who they are, definitely check out their website.

This was one of several items I picked up during that sale. Mostly based upon the intriguing bluray slipcase art. (The movie and it's double-feature counterpart on the disk, HONEYMOON OF TERROR, are both available streaming on Tubi at the moment.) The bluray and streaming versions have very good remastered picture quality, all things considered.

There's not too much to the plot here. One blonde female nudist (Sally Parfait) convinces her room mate to give the practice a try and go with her to Camp Sunshine for the weekend. The blonde female's day job is as a tech involved in lab animal testing. She has an accident in the lab and the doctor irresponsibly disposes the waste in a river. Somehow it makes it's way down to the Camp Sunshine simpleton groundskeeper. Antics ensure.

The part of the title "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Nature" refers to a bit involving some paramilitary responders who are more akin to Classic Doctor Who's Unit. While this is supposed to allude to Kubrick's 'Dr. Strangelove', it's more similar to Kubrick's first experimental film 'Fear and Desire'. When they incorporated stock WW2 soldier footage, LOL. The movie tends to linger and dodder a bit with wistfully edited long takes, especially during Camp Sunshine frolicking nude scenes. Reminds me ab it of 'The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film', an early Oscar nominated short film by 'A Hard Day's Night' and 'Superman II' director Richard Lester. Funny enough RJ&SSF was co-directed by Peter Sellers for another Strangelove connection.

If you can handle a basic 60s Sexploitation film, you can handle this. Otherwise steer clear.

Sidenote: The brunette room mate who played a model in the movie (Deborah Spray) was 60s girl-next-door hot.

Camp Sunshine shirley was the place to be back in 1964....until the monster arrives, that is. I thought the director captured the difficulty in killing some monsters quite accurately. Well worth the climactic ending.

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.