The concluding feature in the ‘Kino Lobor’/’Something Weird’ Nudist/Forbidden Fruit series sees us faced with a dilemma. What do you do when you have 40 minutes of relatively freshly shot footage of nudists larking about in Florida, and a seemingly desperate Sammy Petrillo in your phone book on speed dial. Well…You get ‘Shangri-La’ a 1961 attempt at comedy.

Mercifully, you dont SEE Sammy’s Petrillo in this film, but thats about as merciful as it gets here. The film follows Sammy as…Sammy…a bellboy in jail with a gorilla named Pinky (LITERALLY the gorillas only here because Petrillos last film was ‘Bela Lugosi meets a Brooklyn Gorilla’ and im assuming the film makers thought it might help people remember who Sammy Petrillo was given that it’d been nearly 10 years since Petrillo had last been on the big screen…)

ANYWAY! Sammy the bellboys in the clink, and a friend has come to bail him out, but not before Sammy tells him of this AMAZING adventure he’d recently been on…in which he stalks two women…intensely…and finds out their nudists…and then stalks them around the nudist Coloney…Even when they go to a kids playground and start playing with naked children…something he seemed…OVERLY interested in…

Not content with the stalking charges and accusations of ‘Diddling’ our bellboy decides to go one step further, flying down to Florida to follow the girls to a HUGE nudist camp, infiltrating it as a potential member and wrangling your way into a soft position of power within the camp as host and celebrity judge of a beauty contest!

*Ugh*…

This was PAINFULLY poverty row film making. We’re talking 40 minutes of stock footage, about 2-3 days filming with Petrillo on a single set thats redressed 2-3 times…and thats it. Petrillo gets to do his stand up here for a chunk of the runtime, his hit rate isnt great…his Jerry Lewis impersonations starting to wobble a bit too…

I just…I didnt feel too good about this one at all…Like…technically, the stuff that isnt archival or stock footage was fine enough, the tone is okay…but there are just moments in this that felt icky, WAY sleazier than a lot of the nudist films of this time period.

Petrillo, I feel, isnt strong enough to lead a picture, and the supporting cast really didnt help by being SUPER dry, to the point they were actually quite painful to watch.

The whole film just reeks of ‘We have these elements to play with, lets throw something together to make a buck’ and VERY little else.

I…I dont really have much more to say about it honestly…there are worse poverty row features out there…But not by much. This BARELY scrapes by and the whole scenario of Petrillos Bell boy stalking naked women and children for an extended chunk of the runtime REALLY didnt sit well with me. ESPECIALLY when its married up to a screwball comedy tone…it felt odd. and not in a fun way.

I’d only recommend this as a curiosity piece for someone who’d just watched ‘Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla’ and wanted an answer to the question of ‘If Duke went off to make Mobster movies, what did Sammy do?’ the answer is a LOT of nightclub work, and every 5-10 years or so, he’d turn up in porn.

Not recommended, avoid.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/shangri-la-1961/