Welcome to Arrow Beach

Hilarious title song by Lou Rawls (can someone be a sport and let me know the name of it?) and some tasty nude scenes can't overcome a real muddled film. Sure it's explained that Harvey has a "taste for cannibalism" but where is the rationale behind it? We see a brief flashback scene of Harvey leaving a vintage-Korean war airplane along with a messed up looking crew of overacting teenagers (and Harvey doesn't look any younger than he is in the "present" day scenes -- check out the sideburns) but what exactly happened there? Perhaps the Dutch version has more footage? Also, what about the Stuart Whitman subplot? He was all hot to find out the truth but that sort of faded away. A real mess ... can't believe Harvey checked out with this as the last bit of work on his resume...

A real oddity, this one. Stars Laurence Harvey who also directed and would die before the film was released. Indeed Harvey does not look well or perform well and it is sad that his career should have ended this way. Not that I ever thought him much of an actor but he certainly had a presence when younger and could successfully bring his personality to bear on a film if nothing else. Not here sadly for this is generally poorly directed and poorly performed by all concerned, though we do get a spirited performance from an aged Gloria LeRoy. Indeed her turn precipitates the best sequence in the whole film and certainly prevents any chance of dropping off. Just about worth seeing for it is certainly a little bit different but could have been so much better.

A typical seventies movies; seventies, an era where any movie, any kind of plot, story, characters analysis was possible. The producers were totally on the loose and the directors too. That's why I crave so much about this decade. This movie, this last picture from and also starring Lawrence Harvey is the best proof. Curiously, Harvey finished A DANDY IN ASPIC, after the directorr Anthony Mann passed away, before the shooting ended. But who finished this one, after - this time - Harvey also died? I will have to check. Anyway, this is a tremendous - but not for all audiences - piece of work, that I have always enjoyed to watch. It is weird, disturbing, totally crazy, and that's precisely for this reason I like it.

I honestly wouldn't go as far as to call "Welcome to Arrow Beach" a good film, not nearly in fact, but it's definitely an intriguing and bizarrely compelling mess! This film features the themes and plot aspects of a typically sick-spirited and coarse exploitation flick of the early 70s, but at the same time it has the cast and the musical guidance (Lou Rawls!) of a more sophisticated and ambitious melodrama. The supportive cast is already impressive, with names like Joanna Pettet and John Ireland, while the lead actor/director Laurence Harvey even briefly was a respectable A-listed actor who appeared in blockbusters like "The Manchurian Candidate" and "The Alamo". For some incomprehensible reason, Laurence Harvey decided – shortly before his untimely death due to stomach cancer – to direct himself depicting a dangerously disturbed Korean War veteran who lures gullible girls into the fancy beach house that he shares with his sister, but only with the intention to hack 'em up in the basement and EAT them! We slowly (… VERY slowly…), through incomplete and obscure flashbacks, learn that Harvey's character Jason Henry got forced to revert to cannibalism during the war in order to survive, which evidently left him severely traumatized and mentally unstable for life. The main problem with "Welcome to Arrow Beach", apart from the at times intolerably slow pacing, is that practically nothing happens and that the horror of it all almost exclusively relies on suggestion. We never see Jason Henry consume human flesh and there are only two short and rather vague sequences in which he waves around a meat cleaver and pulls the face of a genuine madman. The other 98% of the film's footage revolves around the naive but lush hippie girl Robbin Stanley (played by a young Meg Foster who only just recently had a glorious supportive role in Rob Zombie's "31") who consecutively survives a wicked hitch-hike with a crazed hot rod driver, narrowly escapes from Henry's slaughter basement, gets called a liar by the police and then flees with a hunky doctor's assistant. Then there's also the completely irrelevant and dull sub plot of the local Sheriff who runs a campaign in order to get re-elected… There are a few isolated moments of suspense, mainly accomplished by Harvey himself thanks to his intense performance, and the fairly brutish massacre of a depressed middle-aged prostitute is the film's dubious highlight.

Gotta dig that funky 70's soundtrack, and at times the film doesn't know if it is a romance, comedy, thriller, or horror film, but it is still pretty entertaining. The ending was a little abrupt and there were lots of plot threads left dangling, but all in all it takes you right back to 1974.