The Pirates of Blood River

Pirates of Blood River is directed by John Gilling and written by Jimmy Sangster. It stars Christopher Lee, Kerwin Matthews, Glenn Corbett, Michael Ripper, Andrew Keir, Oliver Reed, Marla Landi and Peter Arne. Music is by Gary Hughes and cinematography by Arthur Grant.

When Huguenot Jonathan Standish (Matthews) is found guilty of adultery, he is banished from the village and sent to serve hard labour at the penal colony. However, managing to escape, Jonathan is captured by pirates led by Captain LaRoche (Lee) and forced to lead the pirates back to his home village, where, LaRoche is convinced valuable treasure is hidden.

One of Hammer Film Productions pirate ventures, Pirates of Blood River is landlocked but still a whole bunch of piratical fun. Sangster's screenplay dangles interesting carrots that aren't fully unearthed, such as the religious fervour holding the Huguenot village in its grip, and questions of main character's pasts are left unanswered, but cast are very spirited and Gilling, in spite of being brought in late and being a pain in the ass, crafts a fast paced picture of excitement and tension. The small budget and absence of a ship and seafaring malarkey is barely noticed, though this place of plunder doesn't look much like a tropical island. There's good action, especially for the "big" battle at the finale, while it's good to see low cost effects, such as a piranha attack simulated by ripples on the water, actually be very effective for dramatic purpose. Blindfold duelling, too, always a bonus.

Plenty of beards, jolly roger speak, bodily abuse and guerrilla warfare, enough in fact to lift it above its obvious flaws. 7/10

John Gilling directed this pirate adventure that stars Kerwin Mathews as Jonathan Standing, an inhabitant of a 17th century Huegenot village where he was exiled by his father for adultery to a penal colony. While there, pirates led by Captain LaRoche(played by Christopher Lee) kidnap him and force him to lead them back to the village, because the pirates want a rumored buried treasure that their founding fathers left behind, and LaRoche will stop at nothing to find it, not even murder. Marginal Hammer studios film certainly has a colorful title that sums up the plot, and good production values and acting, but story is strangely unappealing and unmemorable, despite an interesting "landlocked pirates" premise.

THE PIRATES OF BLOOD RIVER, a 1962 swashbuckler from Hammer Studios, is one of their lesser outings. You can put this down to Jimmy Sangster's lacklustre story and the lack of a decent budget, which substitutes British locations for the tropics and doesn't even include a pirate ship (apart from in an opening stock shot).

Of course, those of us who enjoy B-movie fare will no doubt enjoy the spectacle of some nondescript British woodland standing in for a more exotic locale - adding a single fern leaf into the shot and a couple of pot plants isn't doing much to fool the viewer! At least it helps take the viewer's mind off the plot, which after a decent first half hour soon descends into repetitive inanity.

Kerwin Matthews (THE 7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD) stars as the youthful, romantic hero figure who's sent to a penal colony after falling foul of his puritan elders. He escapes just in time to help his villagers defend themselves from the clutches of a group of dastardly pirates looking for treasure.

One of the problems with the production is the lack of a sense of menace. The pirates just don't seem to be particularly villainous and the script resorts to them fighting between themselves to supply the action. It doesn't help any when all the best actors play the pirates either: Christopher Lee, Michael Ripper, Peter Arne and Oliver Reed are all having a ball, supplying endless energy, while the villagers (including Dennis Waterman as a kid and an extra-dour Andrew Keir) are a bore.

Still, it's as colourful as ever for a Hammer romp, and I'm predisposed towards this genre so that it held my attention from beginning to end. But with a little more imagination, it could have been a whole lot better and more like the above-average DEVIL-SHIP PIRATES that Hammer made a couple of years later.

You won't find here any 18th-century ships in full sail photographed against a Caribbean seascape of azure blue skies. Instead, all of the action takes place on a mundane-looking island which offers little in the way of beaches or coves. (The geography of this made-in-England movie is disturbingly vague.) The result is somewhat drab and claustrophobic and makes one wish for the colorful sweep of "Anne of the Indies" or "The Crimson Pirate."

Partially making up for this weakness is an interesting cast which includes not only bound-for-better-things Christopher Lee and Oliver Reed but also a curiously-cast Glenn Corbett. Dennis Waterman pops up as a boy who's sent on horseback to warn of the pirates' attack.

Kerwin Matthews qualifies as an adequate hero. However, while the movie's poster shows him bound bare-chested to a ship's wheel, such a scene never appears in the print under discussion.

"Pirates of Blood River" starts out quite promising and exhilarating, to say the least… On a strictly Protestant island community, a young man and an adulterous woman are caught in the act by the woman's husband and the isle's ruler (who's also the young man's father). The petrified girl flees and jumps into a river where she instantly gets devoured by thousands of piranhas, while the man – Jonathan Standing – is exiled to a neighboring prison island for hard labor. He quickly escapes from there but then literally bumps into the eye-patched captain La Roche (Hammer deity Christopher Lee) and his motley pirate crew. They force Standing to lead them to his native island, as La Roche is obsessed with stealing the huge golden treasure that is allegedly hidden somewhere there. As many of my fellow reviewers already righteously pointed out, the most remarkable thing about these "pirates" of Blood River is that they don't have a ship! Sure there are some vague stock footage images of random ships in the distance and a couple of scenes with constructed cabin sets near the beginning of the film, but apart from that everything takes place on land! I can't really fathom why, as the film got produced in the early sixties and thus after a period when Hammer Studios booked some tremendous successes already with grisly horror movies like "Curse of Frankenstein", "Horrors of Dracula" and "The Mummy". In other words, I reckon that Hammer should have had some budget to spend on building a ship, but clearly they didn't think it was absolutely necessary. Don't allow for this to spoil the fun, though, as there are definitely several memorable sequences to enjoy. Any film that features bloodthirsty piranhas receives an additional point in my personal book, and there are more cool scenes, for example the sword duel between two blindfolded pirates (one of them being the almighty Oliver Reed in one of his early Hammer roles) and nasty traps hidden all over the island. There's also a fun scene in which the pirates march through soiled water. Fun to watch, at least, because reportedly many of the actors – including Reed and Lee – suffered from unpleasant little injuries after filming this. "Pirates of Blood River" is by no means a mandatory Hammer must-see, but I warmly recommend it to fans of entertaining low-budget action flicks, pirate lovers and admirers of Christopher Lee.