There is nothing remotely stirring about any of the nudist camp movies that I’ve seen. Okay, so I saw two of them, back to back on a Something Weird™ DVD double feature. What this movie does have is a whole world of random, glancing nudity and one of the wildest, most bug-eyed, goofy endings that I’ve ever come across. Let the fur start to fly!

Compared to Ragnarok’s The Beast that Killed Women, Sunshine has a lot of things going for it that be good under conventional circumstances. It tries to be funny – even opening with a spoof of Monty Python – it takes a stab at character development and it even offers a plot, be it a ridiculous and threadbare one. However, given the fact that these filmmakers were neither equipped nor dedicated enough to actually pull these things off effectively, you end up wishing that they just focused on the task at hand: showing off breasts and hinders. It’s kind of like going through the Burger King™ drive-thru and having the greasy window attendant/pedophile offer you financial advice while you wait for your flame-broiled colon crater. I just came to clog my colon Mr. Dick Cheese Burger Head, I don’t really want to hear about how you can lure just as many pre-teens back to your van with generic M&Ms as the real ones. Yet, I feel like I should appreciate their effort. The filmmakers, I mean.

Anyway, here’s what I caught of the plot. Two allegedly foxy roommates, Claire and Martha (I had to find another website to get their names, this movie’s dialogue is completely incomprehensible), live in New York. Claire is a black haired model; Martha is a lab assistant to a doctor who performs tests on lab rats. Martha kicks off one particularly bad day by breaking her hand mirror. Then, while Claire is off in the luxurious world of swimsuit modeling, she goes to work and gets pushed out of a window by lab rats.

Stop laughing, this is serious! No, really.

Doctor something (again, I don’t even know if he had a name) has put something in the rats’ water that turns them into ferocious, airborne killers. Now, after Martha is saved from being the first person to ever die from being pushed out a window by something smaller and lighter than a piece of bread, the doctor decides that something must be done about this dangerous chemical. His solution? If you guessed put it in a mason jar, run outside, jog across a busy intersection, jog some more and throw it in the peer, you’re definitely too smart for nudist colony movies. Try a beach movie instead.

Oh, did I mention that this is a nudist colony movie? Claire, through a series of flashbacks, tells the story of how she got into nudism. Hence, since we all know how hectic the world of modeling topless swimsuits on the top of the Empire State Building can be, she calls her friend Susannah and arranges a trip to their favorite nudist colony, Camp Sunshine. There, the nudity begins. How is the nudity? Well, let’s just say that your hand will do you just as much good sitting on your knee. These girls are far from titillating. Yet, this film does paint the picture of a comfortable setting in which people who like being naked go to be naked, not because they get off on it but because they are most comfortable that way. I suppose the problem isn’t that they can’t be sexy, it’s that they don’t go there to do so. That said, I would never go to a nudist colony because I know the people you find at them are usually giant, lumpy, hairy freaks. Think Tom and Roseanne Arnold, only times 200.

There are more than just nubile naked peoples at Camp Sunshine, though. There’s also Susannah’s creepy inbred brother Hugo, who has a Glenn Strange, Lon Cheney Jr. thing going on. He is supposed to be a sympathetic character, but that’s undermined by the fact that, while we’re listening to Susannah talk about how harmless he is, he’s menacingly gesturing towards the naked people with a pair of garden sheers. But basically he’s a good guy, he really is.

Meanwhile, the jar of chemical nuttiness has made its way downstream to a fisherman, who steals five good minutes of our lives by unhumorously catching various wacky things and eventually snagging the jar. Think of an even unfunnier version of Jerry Lewis. Then, our intrepid hero places it precariously on the open flatbed door of his pickup truck and drives down the road until the chemical eventually falls off and pollutes a stream where Hugo is spear fishing and needs a drink. Huzzah! There’s your Monster of Camp Sunshine. Improbable? Yes, but the isolation of Chemical X still went off more smoothly than George W’s hunt for his weapons of mass destruction.

After some more nakedness, we find monster Hugo chained up in his shack. Who chained him up or how long he’s been there is apparently none of our business. He gets out and he’s ready to terrorize! By terrorize, I mean he chases one girl and sort of sits on her before running off again. Although I think he did kill someone. It would help if there was any way to keep track of any of the characters, save the exotic Claire, who I suppose was considered attractive in her day. After a while, I had to rely on identifying the female characters by their naked asses. Sure there were strong roles for women in the 60s! Through some series of phone calls, it was hopeless to try to follow the plot after a while, the doctor heads off to Camp Sunshine to save Hugo (I think) while the army takes off on a similar course to destroy him. Yes, dear friends, we were on a collision course with wackiness! And what a collision it is.

The army arrives, complete with Spartan Warriors, tanks, bazookas, and several more kinds of stock footage warfare. For the next three minutes, Hugo is bombarded by enough force to wipe out an entire county and I loved it. It was the military ending of Glen or Glenda on steroids, the kind of thing that shitty filmmakers try to do now but fail miserably because, as I’ve said before, MAKING A BAD MOVIE ON PURPOSE NEVER, EVER, EVER RESULTS IN ACTUAL BAD MOVIE FUN. So stop trying.

Now, you’d think that full-on tank battle would result in total destruction, but actually the next day is pretty nice with only a little smoke remaining. So, it’s back to skinny dipping in the Camp Sunshine pool. The end…and yes, the movie ends with a naked butt that moves out of the way to reveal a chair that says “the end.”

So, 28 gratuitous breast or butt shots (that number is actually pretty low, I’d say The Beast That Killed Women had 2-3 times as many easily), I walked away from Monster of Camp Sunshine amused despite a relative lack of nudist camp goodness. Why? Simply put, the ending was wonderful, flying rats are inherently funny and the naked females, while not very appealing, weren’t as appalling as ones from the 50s, the time when the female body had a weird-ass stomach crease around the navel (perhaps the subject of a later essay, but check out the babes in Horrors of Spider Island to get up close and personal with the 50s stomach crease). While the girls of Camp Sunshine aren’t quite as foxy as the ones from the late 60s Beach Movie Era – the golden age of the female body WOWSY WOW WOW! – you could do a lot worse than these silicon-free free spirits.