Hideout in the Sun 2-DVD Collector's Edition (1960) Review

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(More customer reviews)If the gentle sensuality of beautiful women strolling around a nudist camp is enough to make you smile, you'll likely enjoy "Hideout in the Sun", a good example of the "nudie cutie" genre of the late 1950's and early 60's. "Nudie cuties" were exploitation flicks that played it safe by observing the letter of the law of the period, which essentially said that nudity in itself wasn't obscene, as long as sexual content- real or implied- wasn't part of the mix, too. After all, I'm sure it was reasoned, why produce outright pornography and risk getting shut down by those pesky local community standards when you can just make something like "Hideout in the Sun" and sell almost as many tickets?
Like "Hideout in the Sun", many "nudie cuties" were set in- where else?- nudist camps, as they're among the limited amount of places where one could credibly depict extended scenes of nudity that obstensibly had nothing to do with sex. Other examples of this undeniably picturesque but bizarre genre include "Diary of a Nudist" and "The Monster of Camp Sunshine", which is an honest-to-God nudist horror movie (and an extreme hoot, to boot).
Most "nudie cuties" at least go through the motions of delivering some kind of plot (again, to protect against charges of producing unlawful sex fare). This one features a bank heist plot, with the two heisters eventually taking refuge in a Miami-area nudist camp after their original getaway plans (which involve escaping to Cuba, which tells you how old this movie is), turn sour. The movie actually turns kind of sweet after that, as one of the crooks starts regretting his criminal ways and falls for a fetching redhead at the camp.
As said at the outset, if you can look past the strictly Ed Wood-style production values (or at least enjoy laughing at them), and just sit back and enjoy the pretty nude women walking around, lounging, and talking to one another (really, that's all they do), you'll get some modest pleasure out of this glimpse into this long-extinct genre. However, one has to laugh and wonder what poor raincoat-crowd types thought of all this back in 1960. They likely bought a ticket hoping for some honest adults-only fare and ended up getting endless scenes of the crooks' car driving around Miami before and after the heist, no sexual content at all in the actual nude scenes, and to top it all off, a long, laughably filmed "action sequence" at the end where one crook (the unrepentant one, of course) is chased by the cops into one of those roadside reptile zoos they have all over Florida and ends up fending off both cops and poisonous snakes, which inexplicably are slithering around free inside the zoo. So much for titillation.
This nice little DVD package offers a full-screen print of the film on disc one, a widescreen print on disc two, samplings of other exploitation fare of the period (some fairly sexual, some generally innocent like the main feature), an interview or two, and an interesting commentary track by an expert/enthusiast of the "nudie cutie" genre. "Hideout in the Sun" itself looks pretty good for a film that made heavy rounds on the exploitation circuit, though there are occasional bad splices and sound dropouts. If fringe cinema of years past interests you, however, don't let these small flaws stop you from ordering this bucolic curiosity.
I'm sure "Hideout in the Sun" was filmed with a cynical eye towards cashing in on local rubes' desire to see something a little naughty, but, watching the movie, one can't help but feel that the filmmakers- once the cameras were rolling- gave themselves over to honestly documenting the innocent, playful sensuality of the nudist camp and its denizens. I say this because the middle section of the film gets into a nice little "naturist groove", and you'll probably start feeling the peacefulness and relaxation of the camp's residents yourself. I know I did. Not a bad little bonus from a silly exploitation film, huh?

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