Serpent Island

All of the reviews I've read here talk about this being Bert I. Gordon's first film, but he just photographed it (badly) and the real person of interest here should be Tom Gries, who went on to be a decent journeyman director with a lot of years in TV under his belt before he directed feature films starring Charlton Heston, Raquel Welch, and others. Plus, one of his most notable films was "Helter Skelter", the Charles Manson story made for TV and quite good for its kind. So, knowing all this I kept thinking throughout this movie that with a bigger budget and a better cast, it could have been a passable adventure story of the kind that was very popular in the 1950s. Instead of Sonny Tufts and Mary Munday (not Rosalind Hayes in the female lead as has been erroneously stated here), think Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell, or Gary Cooper and Rita Hayworth, or Clark Gable and Ava Gardner, etc. An A cast like that and a better script, and of course better cinematography and musical score, and you would have something worth watching. Instead we have something so inept on every level that it was painful to watch. The numerous scenes of Sonny Tufts with his shirt off were hilarious, not to mention the supposedly swimsuit-worthy body of Mary Munday. Now as for Gordon's contribution: it looked like a travelogue, complete with travelogue background music, that I kept getting the impression someone took some home movies of a Haitian vacation and tried to make a movie out of it with lots of filler. At least the pain only lasted for 62 minutes.