One more terrible nudist movie from the depths of the Something Weird catalog, my hope had been that GIRLS COME TOO might be a little more interesting, coming later in the cycle and featuring a bunch of frontal nudity added following a Supreme Court ruling that (as the film's trailer trumpets) "nudity itself is not obscene." Alas, even souped up with sleaze, the film's still just as dull as its forebears.
The trick, of course, is that most of the movie IS one of its forebears: 1963's NATURE'S SWEETHEARTS, augmented with copious newly-shot scenes, all filmed at the nature compound of Harry Kerwin, brother of erstwhile BLOOD FEAST costar William. The SWV liners trumpet how these segments stick out like sore thumbs, but honestly, nudist films tend to turn into such numbing slogs it was hard for me to tell. My mind had already been shut down by the endless, soporific narration, huffing lugubriously through the film's shopworn plot: model comes to Florida for a shoot, meets a handsome (at least to her) guy at a horse stable, discovers he's a nudist, and gets inducted into the lifestyle by wandering around a camp ad nauseum. Film ends with wedding bells, blissfully before the hour-mark.
GIRLS clearly intends to draw its audience solely on the basis of what exploitation maven Dave Friedman termed "pickles and beavers," and those it provides in spades, once it actually gets down to business. Still, even the presence of some (actually way more than "some") genuine, honest-to-god frontal nudity (both sexes) can't elevate the form. There's a bit of eye candy for everyone, but if you're looking for any type of entertainment, you're sorely out of luck. By 1968, the exploitation racket had already moved well beyond the nudist camp and was cycling through increasingly graphic iterations of softcore humping, biding its time as it waited for hardcore to finally make its bow. In that regard, GIRLS is a relic out of time, built from a film already necessitating an update a mere 5 years after its release, yet still woefully behind the times. As an inadvertent snapshot of a period of lightning-fast transition in the American sex film industry, it perhaps merits a modicum of interest; unfortunately, like most fossils, it's pretty dry and dusty.
