We’ve also got a number of other characters who tag along too, including our generic “only here because her mother’s a lunatic” heroine, the resident alcoholic 16 year-old, and the lovable but kinda dumb de facto jock heart throb, but they’re the embodiments of that whole “cookie-cutter quality ‘don’t give a shit about them’ types” that I mentioned earlier and are pretty disposable in that sense. So, we can stop wasting space talking about them now, right? Good.

As you can imagine, the nekkid people rise from their cardboard graves, decked out in pseudo clothing made of conveniently placed patches of leaves and moss and blue body paint. They take out the wholesome youngsters one-by-one (with the exception of a large massacre that takes place off-screen in which the ghouls kill half the group), leaving the generic heroine to be rescued by Bygbutts and his dues ex helicopter. She’s in for a surprise though, when she confronts the head of her church about why they choose to keep sending their kids to the Nudist Colony of the Dead… though you’ll probably see it coming like Godzilla over the horizon, provided you didn’t flunk out of the fourth grade.

It’s really not a bad effort for a movie whose crane shots were all done by sitting the cameraman on somebody else’s shoulders. Granted, the special effects gore are expectedly bad and in no way believable, while the audio quality is merely passable in some parts and abominable in others, but there’s that no-budget heart and unbridled “we don’t have any real financial backers, so we can do whatever we want!” fun feeling to it all that makes you smile. The easy parallel would be to call it “Troma-Lite”, but there really isn’t the gross-out humor and graphic splatter that you’d get with a flick out of Tromaville, so that wouldn’t be a fair assumption for Troma lovers who would watch it expecting something more over-the-top or Troma haters who might be missing out on something they’d otherwise get along with all because of one misguided reviewer’s bad use of analogy.

One thing that I’ve only glossed over here are the movie’s musical numbers. Obviously we’re not going to get something sweeping and epic like The Rocky Horror Picture Show or the Jackson Five sequence in Clerks 2, but some of the tunes are actually pretty catchy and the words can elicit a few laughs. The songs range from Bygbutts’s little rap recalling the prior victims’ deaths, to the happy “God loves us on this sunshiny day” showtune, to the “we’ve got no reason to live” pseudo-blues ditty, to Wype’s “let’s kick their zombie asses!” motivational cheerleader shpiel. Though not amazing, I had no problem with the majority of the tunes and find myself randomly belting out the chorus of the theme song at inappropriate or otherwise strange points of the day, much to the chagrin of my Evil Dead Bride. My only big gripe was with the would-be-blues song, which felt like it lasted 20 minutes when it was probably no more than 5. This was the point where I started to question whether the musical parody part of the feature was still a novelty or just an irritating way to pad the fucking runtime. Either way it’s still something that most other movies don’t attempt, so I’ll give Pirro and Pals credit on that part.

Not the best low-budgeter I’ve ever seen, but far the worse, Nudist Colony of the Dead succeeded in one thing if nothing else: getting me interested in seeing Mark Pirro’s other movies. I’ll let you know how that works out. Until then though, if you can find a copy of NCotD to kill 90 minutes of time to, I definitely recommend doing so, if for nothing else, then so you at least have an interesting piece to start off your next conversation with a friend or co-worker. Trust me, nothing gets a reaction like “So, have you seen this movie, Nudist Colony of the Dead?”… unless it’s “So, wanna join me in the broom closet where we’ll take off our pants and spank each other with mop handles during our lunch break?”. Yeah, that one’s a classic.