This movie combines a crime story with lots of bouncing breasts and other gratuitous nudity. I know! That sounds great doesn't it? But it's not. It's pretty boring. The endless shots of nudists sunbathing, swimming, playing volleyball and badminton, and shooting arrows get tiresome and interrupts the plot. Not that the plot is all that interesting. I suppose without a story they couldn't show all the nudity, but it makes the movie too schizophrenic. And I can't help but wonder where they showed movies like this in 1960. Theres's a list of 75 "nudie-cutie" titles on IMDB, so a lot of people watched them somewhere.
But I'm here to discuss the long scene at the end that was filmed in the Miami Serpentarium with its large collection of snakes and its giant cobra statues. Once we get there, we see several background shots of snakes and lizards and alligators, all just as gratuitous and unnecessary as all the breasts. But eventually at least one of the snakes proves necessary to the story, which ends with a death by snake bite.
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Duke and Steve rob a bank and leave with a suitcase filled with a hundred grand in cash. They stop to switch cars, but the second car won't start so they kidnap a dame named Dorothy and take her car to drive them to their getaway boat. When the boat captain refuses to help them because the police are after them, they force Dorothy to take them to the club where she works so they can hide there. To their surprise, the club turns out to be a nudist camp, and the real reason anybody ever watched this dud begins. Duke is furious but Steve is happy to strip down and show Dorothy how to hold the shaft. Dorothy gets a case of Stockholm syndrome as she and Steve hit it off, but Duke isn't happy hiding in a room watching all the naked girls, so he and Steve steal a car and split. Worried that they're being followed, they pull in to the Miami Serpentarium to hide. (They should have stayed with all the naked chicks.) Duke double-crosses Steve and knocks him out, taking the cash. Then he climbs over a wall into the Serpentarium. A woman there calls the police and when an officer shows up, Duke jumps into a snake enclosure to hide, not knowing there is a large cobra inside. The cobra bites him on the hand, he makes a few agonized snake faces, then he dies. A bit too quickly, but that always happens in the movies. The actor isn't filmed anywhere near the cobra, so we don't see the snake actually bite him, but it's implied in the editing and in the fact that he ends up dead on the ground.
I don't know what kind of cobra bites him, maybe a King Cobra, but we also see brief shots of a boa constrictor, several rattlesnakes, a cottonmouth, a rat snake, and an indigo snake, which apparently we are supposed to believe are just crawling around loose inside the Serpentarium. |