Savage Island

"...You're going to remember this for a long time." And I have! Going back a few years, when I must have been so bored as to rent the most ridiculous, low budget films, this gem was etched in my mind. It's full of poorly done over-dubs. Hilarious! "I have some lovely letters and postcards from the outside world. How they ever found their way here is beyond me." Savage beach! A must not rent!

-GG

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!...

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.

If you are into women-in-prison films, "Escape from Hell" in any good copy near the 89 minute Italian/Spanish original, would entitle you to watch the most erotic, and violent, nude lesbian fight - for possession of the third girl in a cell, between black Ajita Wilson and queen-bee Cintia Lodetti; and a gun duel between the same black fugitive and a Nazi female warden (Christina Lay?) to a mutual gory death. Both fights are at close quarters, and filmed in crude detail, which explains so many "director's cuts" of this film, for different markets.

Gun-toting babe Daly (Linda Blair) seeks revenge for the pain and suffering endured in a prison camp on a tropical island, where the prisoners are forced to dig for emeralds.

Linda Blair gets top billing and is front and centre on the poster for Savage Island, but the actress only appears in the bookend scenes, and provides an occasional voiceover to try and bring some kind of cohesion to the film's sloppy, central women-in-prison narrative, which has been clumsily edited together from footage from two older films - Escape from Hell and Hotel Paradise (both 1980). Penn Jillette, of Penn and teller fame, also appears in the opening scene, but don't expect him to bring any kind of magic to proceedings: he is shot in the head by Blair within the first minute or so.

Daly explains that, while the women of the island dug for precious gems, a gang of rebels planned to free the prisoners, but this plot-line is difficult to keep track of thanks to cruddy editing, diabolical dubbing, night scenes that are virtually pitch black, and because it is impossible to work out who are the good guys and who are the baddies (with at least one guy - the Tom Savini clone - apparently fighting for both sides). The bulk of the film consists of standard women-in-prison nonsense - communal showers, catfights, sadistic guards etc. - but even with frequent nudity from lots of young women (and transexual actress Ajita Wilson), and the occasional spot of violence, the film is still an unbearable dud.

The jungle bound action ends with the women and the rebels making a bid for freedom, pursued by the prison guards, which leads to some bloody bullet hits, and my favourite scene of the whole sorry mess: a girl falls into some water and emerges covered in leeches, so another of the women grabs a shotgun and blasts leech girl in the stomach, apparently to save her from an even worse death. I didn't even know that leeches were fatal.

The film concludes with Linda shooting the owner of the island with a machine gun and taking his fortune in jewels. How she smuggled an automatic firearm past the man's bodyguard is never explained (the idiot pays for his incompetence with his life - serves him right).

2/10. One of the worst WIP films I have seen.