When it comes to outdoor living, I'm not even one for going around barefoot (stub my toes on the damnedest things), so I've never quite caught the full allure of the nudist lifestyle.
It's given us some memorable movie moments over the years, though — Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau shielding himself with a guitar in A Shot in the Dark, Barry Mahon's guy-in-a-gorilla-suit ineptly threatening a batch of non-acting nude cuties in The Beast That Killed Women and "Ron Cheney Jr." stumbling around the country with an axe in 1964's The Monster of Camp Sunshine (conveniently packaged in a Something Weird DVD alongside Barry Mahon’s Beast as a "Monster Nudist Drive-In Double Feature.") Though decidedly not the kinda fare you wanna play for the kids at a pre-teen Halloween Party, those last two flicks are not without their own cheesy charms.
The black and white Sunshine concerns itself with two New York City gals, Marta and Claire, who are practicing nudists. Marta, the blond, is a "nurse and research assistant" who works in a hospital lab where cute-looking lab rats are fed experimental serums; her brunette roomie is a clothes model who's shown modeling a topless swimsuit with the Empire State Building looming picturesquely in the background.
It's Claire who sometimes narrates the "story," though occasionally writer/director Ferenc Leroget inserts silent movie titles into the film to move the story along – and perhaps fool viewers into thinking that they're watching an intentional camp exercise. (I've been unable to find any additional credits for Leroget, though perhaps he's producer Gene Kearney – who later went on write for The Night Gallery and Kojak and also has a screenwriting credit on the killer bunny flick, Night of the Lepus.)
The movie opens with a professional-looking montage of early sixties New York City (quite possibly the most smoothly directed part of the movie), followed by extended shots of our two heroines getting dressed for work (lots of dressing/undressing moments in this movie, usually accomplished with a lit cigarette in hand), as Claire warns us of the horrors ahead. "In New York, just getting up is an adventure," she explains. But the adventure we're about to see "came as close to costing us our lives as a hound does to a treed coon." Thankfully, Leroget quickly eases up on the clunky metaphors in favor of the mildly titillating skin shots.
.jpg?t=20120527181101)
Article comments