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

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.

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.

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.

Rightfully atrocious. "Orinoco-Prison Of Sex" (a.k.a. "Escape From Hell") was an Italian-Spanish women-as-slaves-on-a-South-American-island-who-revolt thing, brought stateside in 1985, christened with a new title and spiced with fresh footage of Linda Blair as a vengeful "ex-employee." Those looking for some hot nude scenes and/or violent confrontations between sexy women in loincloths are bound to be disappointed (the Italian footage is dark, muddy, and un-erotic--not to mention coy, it cuts away at the best parts). As for Blair, she's amusing wrapped in cheap fur, packing heat and ordering her former captor around with a snarl. But, alas, Linda is once again stuck in a turkey. NO STARS from ****