The Monster of Camp Sunshine

Wading through the weirdness of a nudist camp cult classic

Charcoal fan art of the movie by Brett Marcus Cook

I’ve never seen anything quite like the Monster of Camp Sunshine. On paper it makes some sort of sense, but the execution is so outrageous that it feels like my brain is melting every time I watch it. What really baffles me more than anything else is that to this day, it seems like nobody knows who made it!

The Monster of Camp Sunshine or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Nature (yes, that’s the full title) opens with shots of people hanging out and enjoying themselves at a nudist camp with a message overlaid in text: “the motion picture that follows is a fable. In it there are many nudists but only one monster. In life, it is generally the other way around.” Quite a profound statement, but then the opening credits themselves hit, the first sign that this is no ordinary nudist camp movie. There’s paper cutout animation using stills from the film and other photos, not unlike what Terry Gilliam would use for Monty Python some yea…