After a strong opening, 'The Daylight Years' of the Doris Wishman collection slows down considerably with 'Hideout in the Sun' the nudist 'espionage' flick you never knew you never not needed never.

The plot? Two criminals kidnap a young woman and go on the run, they realise that this young woman is in fact, a nudist who's on her way for to a commune for a holiday of 'suns out, buns out'. Thinking it'll be the perfect hiding place, the guys force the woman to take them to the commune, where one pretends to be her husband, and the other hides in the trunk of the car until they're checked in and at their Chale, once their, the trunk guy hides in the hut, while the other criminal heads out into the commune with his 'Wife' to take in the full fun and frolics that a naturist camp in the summer has to offer…with genuine romance, betrayal and action on the cards to boot!

Not much to say on this one, the plot itself occupies about 20 minutes of the full film with the rest either being extrended cutaways of naked models or nudists just…doing what they do. The plot itself sounds fun on paper, but runs considerably slower than it really needed to as the film desperately tries to hit its feature runtime.

The characters arnt that deep or well developed, everything feels overly dry and there isnt much development or variety to keep the average viewer fully engaged on the plot. Tonally its drab, and while it ends with a bit more energy than it starts with. Its all a bit underwhelming if im being honest.

The direction and cine are fairly drab too. Unlike 'Nude on the moon' or 'Blaze Starr' this one feels a bit more washed out, a bit more formulaeic, nowhere near as well structured, with poor compoisitions of shots, bad sequence structuring, and a real lack of focus for the viewer to be drawn in. It very much feels like they just put the camera down, shot whatever happened to be in front of it (no matter how well framed or poorly focussed it was) and then stitched it all together with whatever they could scrape from a day on set.

The performances feel a bit lifeless too, there very little energy, a raised voice here and there is about as wide and wild as the performances get. Physicality is kept to a minimum. Its just not that good.

The soundtracks stock tracks. But it does kind of work here, and its edited together fine enough…

This was the directoral Debut of Doris Wishman, and what I find weird is that this is actually better put together than some of the films she made at the peak of her career. While I cant deny that this is a quite dry and drab production (in my opinion at least) it is at least somewhat functional for the most part. and given what i've seen of Wishmans works. For a first outing? this had the potential to be 'horrendous'…as it stands its just 'fine…but not essential'.

Not one I can recommend, if your going to go through all of Wishmans films, this ones kind of the upper half of the lower middle of the stack. I probably wont watch it again for a good long while, and I cant recommend it as a 'jumping on' point for people looking to get into Wishman either…there's a LOT better out there than this.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/hideout-in-the-sun/