My quick rating – 2.1/10. Mutants of Nature Cove opens with what looks like stock footage of nuclear scientists conducting suspiciously generic “testing” at a beach, along with a few vague hints about radioactive contamination. It’s the closest thing the film has to a production value highlight, and also about the last time anyone appears on screen wearing clothes.
From there, the movie follows a group of party girls who drag shy Beth (Geneva Robinson) along to a supposedly secluded nude beach that’s crawling with hallucination-inducing mutants and one extremely committed spell-casting woman trying to resurrect her dead husband. Beth eventually decides that the soul-stealing mutants need to be sent back to hell permanently, but getting to that point is a long, awkward journey through one of the cheapest-looking productions you’re likely to see.
It becomes obvious almost immediately that the “beach” exists mostly inside a computer. The cast looks like they’ve been dropped in front of a green screen and told to pretend sand is between their toes. The backgrounds rarely match the lighting on the actors, and the illusion collapses constantly. The extras appear to have been filmed somewhere else entirely and pasted into scenes with all the subtlety of a middle-school video project. If you enjoy spotting visual effects mistakes, this movie turns it into a game. Around the 46-minute mark, I saw the green screen bleed-through start appearing in people’s hair, and from there, the errors pile up as if the effects team simply gave up.
The sound design somehow makes things worse. Dialogue echoes with the hollow acoustics of an elevator shaft, which is impressive considering the characters are supposed to be outdoors. Conversations drift in and out with little ambient noise, making every exchange feel awkwardly staged. It doesn’t help that the acting often looks like performers waiting for off-camera direction. Beth spends multiple scenes staring blankly into space in what appears to be less “deep emotional turmoil” and more waiting for Beau Mann to yell action so she knows when to swing the prop weapon.
The mutants themselves are spectacularly terrible, highlighted by dinosaur-headed snake creatures that look like unfinished animation tests. When the entire beach population joins in to fight them, the results are downright pathetic, with actors flailing at empty air while digital creatures float unconvincingly in front of them.
The movie makes constant attempts at landing jokes, but most of them fail. There is even a meta joke about how the beach is a great location to film a movie, followed by a weak dig at exploitation that somehow recognizes what the movie is doing without being clever or self-aware.
The oddest thing about Mutants of Nature Cove is the tone. Despite the nudity and the plethora of slow motion lotion and insect repellent application scenes, it feels strangely innocent instead of sleazy. The cast deserves some credit for their sheer confidence, because performing in a project like this requires a level of commitment most actors wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot boom mic. It appears as if only a handful of actors were ever filmed at one time and then composited together.
Unfortunately, confidence alone can’t save a movie this poorly executed. The effects are awful, the performances are stiff, and the production values barely qualify as amateur. Aside from my admiration for the cast’s willingness to go all-in on a very questionable project, Mutants of Nature Cove is simply a bad movie from start to finish. And if you’re expecting a trailer to preview what you’re getting into, be warned. With a cast that’s fully naked about 99.9% of the runtime, I really didn’t think that was going to happen.
