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

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'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.

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 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.