Navigation

**Minor plot 'set-up' spoilers**

Island of Death (1975)

Dir: Nico Mastorakis

Christopher (Robert Behling) and Celia ( Jane Ryall) arrive on the quaint island of Mykonos in Greece.
They find a room in a boarding house, take in a few sights, get to know the locals and soak up some sun.
They are young, they are horny (they even screw in a glass phone box and Christopher phones his Mother up so she can hear them!) and they are… completely psychotic!

Chris is a paranoid, puritan loony who throws abuse at people for their lack of morals, despite having absolutely none himself!
Upon seeing the woman they are renting their room from having sex with someone else other than her Husband (in front of a window!) Chris declares "Bitch! She's a Bitch I tell you! A bloody bitch…If I was her Husband I'd kill her", and he describes a newly married Gay couple as perverts and filthy creatures that don't deserve to live.
And all this dear reader is from a guy who sets his Wife up with Jean Claude the randy painter and photographs them having sex and, in the film's most infamous scene (though nothing is shown in detail), screws a cute little goat (!) before slicing it's throat!
It's as I've always said…those that loudly take the moral high ground are normally on the lowest moral level. Don't trust 'em!
Celia is a nympho with extremely violent tendencies and just as bonkers as Chris. She in fact takes great pleasure in helping the crazy Chris out when they go really overboard and turn to torture and multiple murder as Chris decides to rid the island of all the sinners!

But not everything is perfect in psycho's paradise. Their trail has been picked up by the mysterious 'Foster', whom it turns out they are hiding from, cracks are appearing in their relationship and a nasty surprise awaits ………

 

Ladies and Gentlemen! Roll up! I give you one of the most famous titles on the 'Video Nasties' list.
And it just may be the most bizarre and just plain wrong, oh so wrong, movie on the damn thing.

The film's main strength is that the whole idea of this deranged psychosexual couple comes completely out of nowhere.
The unusual start to the film would have you believe they are the victims and their arrival on the island (OF DEATH!) is set-up like any other 'innocent, care-free, young victims before the horror' sequence you would normally get in a, well, more normal film.
When the phone box scene occurs you can't quite believe what's going on, and as their actions get progressively worse you find yourself smiling with grudging respect at Nico Mastorakis for turning not only the viewers initial expectations upside down, but the basic conventions of what cinema normally gives us as well.
A perfect example of this is actually the film that shares the alternative title of "Island of Death", Chicho Ibáñez-Serrador 's "Who Can Kill a Child?", a film that has the basic initial set-up of a young couple arriving on a Mediterranean island where 'something terrible' happens.
The kind of set-up seen many times before and since.
But while in (the still excellent) "Who Can Kill a Child?" that 'something terrible' is what the conventional young couple find themselves fighting for their lives against, in Mastorakis's "Island of Death" his seemingly conventional young couple ARE the 'something terrible'!

Mastorakis's script throws in a crazy bit of irony at one point as well when Celia wakes up from a nightmare, "That man in my dream! He killed you and raped me"
To which Chris astonishingly replies, "Calm down, things like that only happen in nightmares"! Yeah Chris, and they also happen to others when you and Celia go on vacation!

Sick and twisted Chris is the highlight in fact and gives us many hysterical philosophies for us to enjoy along the way…
"God punishes perversion and I am his Angel with the flaming sword, sent to kill dirty worms"!
"No one wants to live with perversion, children must be brought up in a proper way! Nature is strong"!
Celia is pretty much left in his shade (until the way out finale) but has a few choice moments of lunacy, not least of which is making a guy suck on gun barrel.

Away from this delightfully whacked out (if at times rather messy) script though the film does have a few problems, not least of which is that the soundtrack is dominated by three ear destroying songs (with lyrics by Mastorakis) that are so damn bad you have to wonder if everyone involved in their inclusion all came down with a case of deafness on the day they were scored in!
If they had ditched the lyrics and simply kept the tracks as instrumental pieces all would have been well (away from the songs the score is actually okay and works perfectly for the film) and the audience's ears would not be bleeding. But it did not turn out like that… so be prepared.
But then again there is part of me, deep down, that thinks these awful (and awfully weird) songs do seem to fit with the general craziness that pervades the entire enterprise.

But enough of all this. What about the reputation this film has for being a sick, sick puppy? Well, the aforementioned goat scene and general activities mentioned above will give you some idea.
But we also have plenty of other twisted sights to entertain us.
Although much of the plentiful and rather energetic sex (ranging from Heterosexual, Homosexual, Lesbian and of course Bestiality) is not explicit, there is bountiful nudity and everything is drenched in an overpowering scent of filth.
One wonderfully obscene sequence in particular, involving an older woman, comes right out of nowhere and just drips (in more ways than one) with sleazy fun.
And although I won't give too much away…listen out during the finale for the kind of 'insult' that you very rarely see (or indeed hear) in a horror film.

Now it may be true that the gore is actually pretty minimal (and I think this is what disappoints some who have seen the film after hearing the hype) but what there is, when mixed with the almost constant stream of bad taste ideas and the occasionally grotesque sight, has more effect than it would otherwise do if it was part of less deranged movie.
And there is always a very violent and sadistic tone to the killings due in no small part to the gratification Chris shows as he carries them out.
And one of the murders is entertainingly comic, in the blackest sense of course.

Acting is basically a mixture of the clumsy and the outright bad, with a cameo by Mastorakis himself (as a very confusing sleuth/novelist character) being the worst of a pretty bad bunch.
The pretty Jane Ryall (who sounds English, and never made another film) is pretty bad as Celia but Robert Behling (who later appeared in small roles in a handful of films and who according to Mastorakis was a disturbed young man who later killed himself by sucking on a tank of propane gas!) is so far out in his performance that the old cliché of 'so bad it's good' springs instantly to mind.

The extended finale (featuring that years winner of the 'Most Foul and Sexually Deranged Greek Shepherd' Contest!) is suitably filthy and bizarre, has a wonderfully perverse twist and delivers some ironic justice.
It all slams to a halt rather abruptly, but this finale is so mad and unusual that it quite simply plops the cherry on top of a film that as a whole is basically unlike anything you have seen before.

Sick, weird, bizarre, crazy, silly, crudely made, swamped by bad songs and badly acted.
And very much recommended by me! Go get it now!