Savage Island

Escape From Hell??? Prison Of Sex??? Which is it???

This movie su-u-u-u-u-u-u-cked!

Take Linda Blair, put her in furs, have her cap a security guy, (A slumming Penn Jillete.) then put her face to face with a sleazy diamond merchant/slave farm owner. It must have sounded cool at one point.

Both of the early films that were ripped off, and had the Blair footage wrapped around, seemed like passable entertainment. But this horrid mess must have been made as a joke.

No coherence. Characters switching on and off at will. Seemingly endless shots of chicks in jungle gear sweating and running before dying. That does get boring when done wrong. And this was WRONG.

And who/where was that sneering voice coming from? (" Come on! You gotta WOOORRRKKK!!!!")

The late Leon Askin (Gen. Burkhalter in "Hogan's Heroes.") was the lone watchable one. His brief scenes seemed like the only serious ones.

Crap!

Daly (Linda Blair) walks into a high-rise, pulls a gun, and shoots a security guard (Penn Jillette!) in the forehead. Daly's there to tell her former employer about her mistreatment at the hands of his jungle thugs. This is done through flashbacks of events having nothing to do with Daly.

The "plot" has to do with emeralds and those profiting from them. However, it's mostly scenes of sweaty women fighting, sweaty men murdering each other, and sweaty women losing their clothes while fighting. This is punctuated by voiceover narration from Daly, to remind us that this monotonous mess is supposed to make some sort of sense.

Not even the perpetual parade of full frontal female nudity can ease the agony of this cinematic dog barf!...

I have this obscure movie on VHS and the cover features Linda Blair in a revealing outfit, holding a machine gun. In the actual movie, she does hold (and fire) a machine gun, BUT: A) Her outfit is a formal dress under a fur coat, B) Her part is a 5-minute cameo (plus a few lines of narration). The rest of "Savage Island" consists of copied-and-pasted footage from TWO Italian/Spanish Women-In-Prison films, one of which I've seen ("Escape from Hell") and one I haven't ("Orinoco - Prison of Sex"). The result is, as you might expect, a complete mess. There is no continuity between the scenes, sometimes even between the shots. 2 women start fighting dressed, in the next shot they are naked (because a lesbian scene in-between has been omitted). In one shot it is night, in the next shot it is day. In one shot the prisoners are in a circle, in the next shot they have formed lines. There are TWO different prison wardens, and the SAME female guard gets killed twice. It's all quite laughable and shameless. Rating: 0 out of 4 stars, pushed up to 0.5 because Linda Blair with a machine gun is sexy.

Women who have been captured and sold as slave labor to a South American emerald mine hatch a plan for revolution and revenge.

What this film consists of is footage from "Escape from Hell" (1980) and "Hotel Paradise" (also 1980) spliced together with a new wraparound featuring Linda Blair. The new wraparound is directed by Nicholas Beardsley... but who is Nicholas Beardsley?

Of course, the new version makes no sense because the characters do not match up. The fact it is even comprehensible at all is something of a miracle. (Apparently Charles Band had a hand in creating this, but I am not sure the details on that.)

The two films this came from were both directed by Edoardo Mulargia ("Don't Wait, Django... Shoot!") and written by Sergio Chiusi ("SS Experiment Love Camp"), so if any credit is deserved, it should go to them. But why not just watch their real films?

Sadly, the quality is terrible (even on the Shout Factory release) and I suspect there is not much that can be done about that because the footage clearly did not come from original negatives.

Savage Island (1985)

** (out of 4)

An escaped convict (Linda Blair) who was tortured manages to find the man (Leon Askin) who ran the operation. She then holds him at gunpoint while she explains the ordeal that she had to go through. This butcher job from Charles Band and Empire Pictures is actually two EuroTrash films, ESCAPE FROM HELL and HOTEL PARADISE, which were originally shot back-to-back with the same cast. Those two films are edited down in one 79-minute movie, which features newly shot stuff with Blair at the start and end. Why Band decided to shoot the new scenes is anyone's guess but he must have thought Blair on the poster would get more ticket sales. Overall this film is hard to fully judge because on one hand you're basically watching a chopped down version of ESCAPE FROM HELL and why do that when the full thing is available? You might as well watch that and if you must see the new scenes with Blair you can just fast forward through everything else here. As far as the new footage goes, it's all done pretty cheaply and doesn't feature anything that you must see. As for the two films that are edited into this, they both seem a lot better as there's all sorts of nudity, sex and of course silly violence. Ajita Wilson plays the lead prisoner who starts up a fight as the women are being killed and beaten in order to dig up diamonds for their evil owner. As for SAVAGE ISLAND, it's an ultra cheap film but with all the naughtiness going on, it's worth watching for exploitation fans.