n upbeat, typically sixties animated credits sequence leads us into this strange but not totally successful flesh-eating plant film. If you're going to deliver a weird plant film – give us more weird plants and less inter-personal drama!
A group of rubes are talked into taking a short cruise an a botanical tour of an almost deserted island. Amongst those travelling are a drunken slutty wife and her boring husband, a lady who loves talking pictures of everything, a young girl (Elisa Montes – a regular Western actress), a young guy, and a botanist, who is the only person who would realistically want to go on a tour like this. Things take a turn for the worst almost right away when an old man covered in weird wounds stumbles in front of the car and dies.
Cameron Mitchell shows up as the Baron who own the usual big scary mansion and tells everyone not to worry about the dead guy as he was insane and sick anyway (the old woman takes a picture of the corpse for good measure). Cameron, who is dubbed by someone else, explains that he's got all sorts of weird plants everyone can have a look at (and I admit I drifted away from his botanical jibber jabber – and I have an allotment!).
He's still gibbering on about nitrogen in the soil or what not during dinner, but at least he dishes up a cucumber that tastes like beef! This leads to more jibber jabber, plus there's the twin brother of the dead guy that frightens the crap out of people, and apart from the strange porcupine plants he shows them, the film settles in for people bickering for a while when we should have more footage of whatever strange plant is sucking people's blood out.
I guess people go on about the ending as it's the only really interesting part of the film. Turns out there's this huge tree that attacks people and Cameron wanted to feed it the tourist, plus the thing spews blood everywhere when you hit it with an axe. It's very possibly that I would have liked this film more if the print wasn't full screen, jerky and twitchy, but then again the film did say 'Starring Cameron Mitchell' so what was I expecting?
Killer plants will return to Euro-cinema in Contamination .7!
Cameron Mitchell will return to crappy films as a mad doctor in Nightmare In Wax, a crappy overacting criminal in Greek giallo Medusa, a member of the KKK in the Klansman, as whatever he was in the slasher film Haunts, a terrible psychic in shitty South African slasher film The Demon, a cop versus Satan in The Nightmare Never Ends, a mumbling cult leader in Martial Arse film Low Blow, a grizzled bar owner in great eighties action film Codename: Vengeance, and also as a crooked country park owner in Memorial Valley Massacre – and those are just the Cameron Mitchell films I own!
