The Island of the Fishmen

Menacingly marooned upon this desolated isle of multitudinous madness, malevolently manhandled by increasingly malign mermen, and tormented by a tyrannical toffee nosed toff (Richard Johnson), these ragged, starveling, long-suffering sailors fatefully discover that its gill or be killed in genre maestro, Sergio Martino's small scale, sinisterly subaquatic shocker 'Island of The Fishmen'. Luridly Lovecraftian, and teasingly exotic, this unfathomably fabulous, successfully genre-bending 70s creature feature is certain to get its hooks deep into you long before the final reel!

Handsomely shot, with an engagingly boy's own text, beloved Euro-cult icons, Richard Johnson, Claudio Cassinelli, and the exquisitely beautiful Barbara Bach provide the weighty dramatic ballast that keeps this far from waterlogged, frequently fin-tastic Italian fright-flick afloat! No mere B-Movie minnow, this leviathan of diabolical dentistry proves to be kinkier than Jules Verne, delves deeper into twisted animalistic terror than H. G. Wells, and delivers more shocks than a startled stingray! Long neglected, Sergio Martino's far-flung fright-fest now sparkles on remastered HD, revealing a dazzlingly toothsome treasure chest of tantalizing terror for future horror fans to discover! Not only is Martino's rip roaring, high seas adventure enormously fun to watch, the sinfully scrumptious, brine-soaked Barbara Bach is quite ravishing to behold, and the beguilingly boggle-eyed mermen make for uncommonly striking protagonists.

This movie surprised me. The box is misleading, the tagline is misleading and the costumes and tone of the film are misleading. The movie is quite gory, well-acted and beautifully shot. The special-effects are top-notch and seem to be ahead of their time, until you realize this movie came out in 1979, not in 1963 like it's tone would suggest. It is a unique take on the Dr. Moreau story, and one of the better versions filmed. The first fifteen minutes are the highlight and the most shocking, but the film doesn't ever really fall apart. Definitely worth-seeing if you are a fan of dramatic costume/horror classics and gore-fests.

Screamers is an Italian fantasy film (L'Isola degli Uomini Pesce) bought by Roger Corman and released through his New World Pictures. Of course Corman has to carve his initials on it by having one of his lackeys (Dan T. Miller) direct some additional gore footage before he has it released in the states.

L'Isola degli Uomini Pesce is a very entertaining retelling of the Island of Dr. Moreau. It is 1891 and Claudio Cassinelli is shipwrecked on a mysterious island with a few newly escaped convicts. Claudio comes across the stellar Barbara Bach and Richard Johnson. Johnson plays the dastardly Edmund Rackham: a man who is able to manipulate scientist Joseph Cotton into turning the local native population into amphibious deep-sea diving creatures, (they look like a cross between the Black Lagoon creature and one of The Humanoids From the Deep), by convincing Cotton that the mutations are being created for the highest of scientific and humanitarian motives.

Having discovered the lost city of Atlantis, Rackham is using the amphibious creatures to loot its treasures. Sexy Barbara Bach plays Cotton's daughter who has a psychic link with these mutations. In one memorable scene, Bach takes a midnight swim with these mutants wearing only a thin white cotton dress that leaves little to the imagination. Claudio discovers one of the convicts he has befriended has been turned into a gill-creature and then all Hell breaks loose.

Filmed at the same time and in the same location as Zombi 2, Richard Johnson didn't even have to change suits between films. The house where the experiments take place is the same house Johnson uses to conduct experiments in Zombi 2. Talk about economic filmmaking!

The additional footage features a few bloody beheadings, (way to go Roger!), and a laughably bad Cameron Mitchell doing his best pirate imitation. All that's missing is the parrot.

Spanish title: Le Continent Des Hommes Poissons

This is a very enjoyable lost island adventure movie. A group of men are shipwrecked on an island ruled by a white "master" accompanied by an attractive white woman (Barbara Bach), inhabited by voodoo-practicing natives as well as some CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON type "fish men". The plot is silly (as in most movies of this type), the acting and the lines are cheesy in most cases, but it is a v-e-r-y polished-looking effort. The scene of Barbara Bach secretly leaving her manor at dawn (or dusk), crossing a shallow lake, and feeding the fish men a potion on the seashore is especially very poetic looking. The undersea footage of the ruins of Atlantis is also very impressive. One minor defect: the voodoo subplot seems to go nowhere. Surely, there are elements of THE ISLAND OF DR MOREAU in the plot, but I think the idea to make this movie was kicked off by previous year's WARLORDS OF ATLANTIS from Britain. By the way, I think the "man whose inside turned outside" tag-line in the movie's US publicity refers to the scene of a man in the lab tank who is slowly being mutated towards a fish man.

Although the video box for many copies of this film claims it is about people turned inside out, this is a total lie. In fact, apart from the opening segment, the film isn't even a horror movie. With its sunken treasure, legions of fish people, and mad scientists, it's a lot more like a Doug McClure adventure movie. Obviously, this film is no work of art, but it's kind of fun to watch... Just be warned that the beginning is quite gory.