|
|
|
The Monster of Camp Sunshine & Honeymoon of Terror
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - America - American Genre Film Archive Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (28th January 2022). |
|
The Film
 The Monster Of Camp Sunshine: Model Claire (Deborah Spray) and nurse Marta (Sally Parfait) are a pair of computer-matched roommates in New York. Claire makes fifty dollars an hour modeling clothes for photographer Ken (Ron Cheney Jr.) and Marta works as a research assistant to scientist Harrison (James Gatsby) who is experimenting on animals with radioactive chemicals. Apparently the computer roommate service knew that Marta was a nudist and Claire's willingness to pose in a topless bathing suit atop the Chrysler Building are like forms of exhibitionism, since Marta introduced Claire to nudism early on in their cohabitation with a visit to the upstate Camp Sunshine run by Marta's friend Susanna (Natalie Drest) and her simple-minded brother Hugo (Harrison Pebbles). Marta's traumatic attack by mutated lab mice is excuse enough for she and Claire to pay another visit. Unbeknownst to them, however, a contrite Harrison has decided to dispose of his experimental chemicals "safely" by tossing a jar into the East River. Against physics, the jar drifts upstream where it is fished out and mistaken for moonshine by a local fisherman. The jar, however, falls off the back of his station wagon during a bumpy ride and smashes in a creek from which Hugo bathes and drinks. When Claire and Marta arrive – along with Ken and his inhibited assistant Laurie (Angela Evans) – they are received by a solemn Susanna who confides to Laurie that "my brother has become a monster" that she keeps chained in a shack but choses to withhold that information from the others so as not to spoil bare-bottomed Claire's birthday party. Soon enough, horny and violent Hugo is stalking the party with an axe. Starting in the thirties, nudist films got around censor and production code concerns by being sold as lifestyle documentaries, with more fictionalized narrative takes branded "nudie cuties" emerging in the early sixties as censorship standards started to relax. While Herschell Gordon Lewis and David F. Friedman were keeping florid color bare flesh and fake blood separate in sexless nudist comedies like Goldilocks and the Three Bares and nudity-free gorefests like Blood Feast, The Monster of Camp Sunshine as a nudie cutie, with its first act milieu of guerilla New York exterior filming and scantily-clad women lounging stark white apartments with traffic sounds filtering through from without, drags with it the noir- and JD-influenced aural and visual aesthetics that would later in the decade fork into the Bergmanesque softcore psychodrama of Joseph Sarno (Vibrations), the roughie genre representative of the works of Michael Findlay and his actress/cinematographer/future director wife Roberta with works like The Touch of Her Flesh – and the genre's apotheosis in Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left (it too inspired by Bergman as a riff on The Virgin Spring) – and the East Coast strain of hardcore pornography; indeed, the very look of the film more so than the actual antics of mutated Hugo might have more seasoned viewers expecting things to take a very grim turn.  Against such expectations, the film is otherwise very much a typical nudist film with no sexual desire conveyed between any of the characters – a waste of an inhibited like Laurie – and the film goes out of its way to hide the genitals that filmmakers just a year or so later would either expose for titillation or out of carelessness. The film is heavy on narration and characters speaking either offscreen or with their faces averted from camera a la Doris Wishman (Hideout in the Sun) with only a couple instances of attempted post-synch (in any case, the "dubbing" is obvious with distant voices achieved by the actors standing farther away from the microphone rather than adjustments in levels and filtration). What was already merely silly vaults into outright absurdity when Harrison arrives with the antidote accompanied by the cavalry in the form of stock footage from several different sources depicting several different wars; the contents of which surely must have eaten up half the budget, the other half having been spent on the opening credits animation and opticals which suggest something more whimsical than is delivered from the title The Monster of Camp Sunshine, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Nature. The scoring is a pick 'n' mix of needle drops including recordings of "Camptown Races" and "Swanee River" along with other cues that give the film the air of a silent film occasionally supported by the use of intertitles. Pseudonymous director Ferenc Leroget is just as untraceable as the cast and editor/cinematographer Motley Crue. Honeymoon of Terror: Newlyweds Frank (Doug Leith) and Marion (Dwan Marlow) see the sights of Vegas but find a motel room not suitably intimate to consummate their marriage (yeah, right). Marion fancies a deserted isle, and Frank knows just the place: "Thunder Island" which has supposedly been uninhabited for at least fifteen years. No sooner do they arrive then Frank notices something wrong with the boat. While he heads back to the mainland to get it fixed, Marion decides to take a skinny dip. She then falls asleep on the beach only to wake up to the looming presence of a hulking, horny hermit (Invasion of the Star Creatures' Anton von Stralen) who gives chase across the island. Meanwhile, Frank learns from a local old timer (writer/director Peter Perry Jr.) the story of Ridge Runner, a logger who went loco, raped two girls, butchered a third, and then blew up the general store with dynamite. He is believed to still be living on the island, and a coming storm may prevent Frank from getting back to Marion before it is too late.  Not so much a nudist film, but definitely a nudie cutie with its rushed setup and resolution built around the central spectacle of Marlow stripping in long shot and going for a dip where the camera is closer but the rippling water obfuscates a clear look, Honeymoon of Terrror is slight but at least well-made with sync-sound dialogue, some production value from attractive and expansive backdrops, and crisp, occasionally creative photography by Basil Bradbury (Strike Me Deadly). Playing like a drier version of Byron Mabe's later, grislier The Bushwhacker, the film actually seems less interested in exploitation outside of the skinny dipping sequence, so the climax's only excitement is from a bit of hand-to-hand combat. Honeymoon of Terrror was Perry's second film following Revenge of the Virgins and he would follow it up with a handful of nudie cutie films like Kiss Me Quick! and later more graphic efforts like The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill for producer/distributor Harry Novak's Box Office International.
Video
The Monster of Camp Sunshine had its home video debut in 1993 as the third volume of "Frank Henenlotter's Sexy Shockers from the Vaults" followed in 2001 by a Monster Nudist Double Feature DVD with The Beast That Killed Women from Image Entertainment. As with that DVD, AGFA has been able to avail themselves of the original 35mm camera negative for their 2K-mastered 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.37:1 pillarboxed fullscreen transfer that is completely unblemished with a nice range of blacks, whites, and grays thanks to well-exposed photography. Honeymoon of Terror was volume twenty-three in the Sexy Shockers collection but it did not make it to the DVD format. Also scanned in 2K from the original 35mm camera negatives, the 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen transfer – bearing the reissue title "Ecstasy on Lover's Island – is also shockingly clean and crisp with the almost hot whites in the exteriors suggesting that it was deliberately overexposed slightly to give a sunnier feel to the film's settings (odd since there is much talk about a coming snowstorm). 
Audio
The DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 mono audio tracks for both films are also in great condition, cleanly conveying the scoring, sparse effects, and the shortcomings of The Monster of Camp Sunshine's post-synched dialogue recording and narration and the bombastic nature of the needle drops. Honeymoon of Terror's sync-sound dialogue and narration is more professionally recorded and mixed. Optional English SDH subtitles are provided. 
Extras
Extras start off with a third feature is All Men Are Apes! (63:24) in which high school dropout Diane (Stephanie De Passe) ponders an offer from lounge lizard Rocky (The Suckers' Steve Vincent) to bankroll her career as a stripper when she begins to cramp her mother's (Grace Lynn) style by drawing the attention of her current sailor boyfriend Nick (Steve Meyer). Rocky takes her to a party given by effete Marcel (stage director Tom O'Horgan who later helmed the American Film Theatre screen adaptation of Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros) in which the high-class lowlifes are entertained by a stripper who is pelted by them with vegetables – in what Diane describes as a "wake for the Jolly Green Giant" – but is eventually driven to make a go at stripping when WWII vet Rocky turns out to want a geisha rather than a girlfriend. She becomes an overnight sensation and gets paid to pen her memoirs for a local magazine, but it's not all rainbows since her big movie deal turns out to be a private casting couch session with no camera in sight. She gets back on her feet by becoming part of a duo act in which she gets her clothes torn off by a trained gorilla. She finally thinks she has found happiness when she meets syndicate man Buddy (Mark Ryan), but he soon proves that "all men are apes" and the only decent one is still literally dragging his knuckles.  With a heavy emphasis on narration to give a greater sense of narrative scope to what is really just a handful of scenes and a lot of mentioned pivotal incidents, All Men Are Apes! is occasionally amusing and eccentric but also rather listless. Although director Joseph P. Mawra, who got his start as a joke writer for pre-Johnny Carson Tonight Show host Jack Paar, is better known for his roughie movies like Olga's House of Shame, he seems here to have one foot in the theatre scene and one in the burlesque with supporting bits by June Roberts (Red Roses of Passion) and some professional dancers and belly dancers. In spite of its brevity, it does appear that Mawra had some ambition with this film beyond a quickie nudie film; however, it appears as though budget and scheduling was more responsible for the storytelling shortcuts than laziness. Presumably left off the billing because of the lesser source,the film was derived from Something Weird's S-VHS master used for the company's VHS and DVD-R editions, but we have no explanation as to whether the film materials have gone missing in the years between or if a remaster was not worth the expense given some dialogue-dropping splices. The upscaled 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.33:1 pillarboxed fullscreen image is fairly clean but grain and analogue video noise make it seem less visually appealing than the HD co-features. The opening Something Weird Video bumper familiar from their VHS releases is included, bringing the running time up to 65:52. The only other extra is a selection of "Nudie Trailers from Hugo's Shack" (19:53) including The Curious Dr. Humpp – an Argentinian softcore oddity that had additional US sex inserts added to it (both versions can be seen on AGFA's Blu-ray) – The House on Bare Mountain, Professor Lust, The Sadistic Hypnotist, and the absolutely dreadful-looking The Wacky World of Dr. Morgus (a vehicle for Sidney Noel Rideau who played Louisiana horror host "Morgus the Magnificent").
Packaging
The first 3,000 copies ordered directly from Vinegar Syndrome include a special limited edition embossed slipcover.
Overall
The American Genre Film Archive's Blu-ray double feature of The Monster of Camp Sunshine & Honeymoon of Terror - along with bonus feature All Men Are Apes! - gives viewers a peekaboo at the transition from nudist documentaries and burlesque titillation to fleshy feature thrills.
|
|||||
|