Please Don't Eat the Babies

Hank Worden, Mose in "The Searchers", winds down a great career with this student film mish-mash of a movie. Yachters use Worden's small island pier/store to stock up on supplies. The island is off limits and there is a curfew for the paying customers. Yachters are supposed to drop a few bucks and push off. Any one breaking the rules discovers Worden has a family inland that bears more than a passing resemblance to the Texas Chainsaw Clan. Which would have been fine. The film gets even more inept trying to inject a monster menace. Aquatic cockroach things that Worden's family has a weird empathy with.

Although, I had no earthly idea on what to expect from this movie, this sure as hell wasn't what I would have had in mind, had anything actually come to mind. Once I heard of its existence, all I knew was that I had to own a movie called Please Don't Eat The Babies. unfortunately, I could only find a copy under its alternate title, Island Fury. Looking back, I guess I could call it a lose-lose situation. On one hand, I still don't get to be known as the guy who owns a movie called Please Don't Eat The Babies, and on the other hand, Island Fury would ultimately reveal itself to be an awful, pointless, boring, unwatchable piece of garbage. Yeah, definitely lose-lose.

I'm not even sure what genre they're going for here. Just early 80's badness, with a flashback that might actually be longer than the non-flashback. First up, two teenage girls are being chased by two bad guys, once caught, the bad guys bring to our attention that one of the girls have a coin on a string, around her neck, and somehow, these bad guys know of a lot more of these coins hidden on an island somewhere. And this is where things start to get weird, somehow these guys know of a trip the girls took to some island, years earlier, when they were only 10. I guess this is supposed to mean that the girls should know exactly where this alleged treasure is. So, now, we're in the past, while the girls try to retrace their steps, so these bad guys don't kill them, although, I wouldn't have minded if they had. In the flashback, the 10 year old counterparts are on a boat trip with their sisters and the sisters boyfriends, eventually stopping by an island for some air, they get mixed up with some kid and his killer grandparents. Any potential suspense or reasons to keep on watching never shows up, but the flashback was undeniably better than the present, which still isn't saying a whole lot.

For a while there I had forgotten about the original story. At one point, I thought maybe the director had too, and when the flashback ended, that would be the end, which would have worked for me considering this disappointment would have been a half-hour shorter. This pointless movie within a pointless movie does eventually end, and real stuff does happen, but it's stupid. I guess I didn't exactly expect a movie filled with infants being devoured, or anything like that, but I did expect some form of outlandish B-entertainment, mostly just a confusing, inept storyline, unsure of its genre. My advice would be to seek out something worthwhile like Attack Of The Beast Creatures. If anyone, I would only recommend this one to serious B-movie collectors who must have them all, anyone else interested probably has brain damage. What really gets me is that I still have no idea why they called it Please Don't Eat The Babies. 3/10

I'm generally pretty indulgent towards these low-budget, shaggy-dog horror movies from the 70's and 80's. After all, it was hard to make movies back then with very limited resources (I'm less indulgent today when any talentless idiot with a digital video camera can easily foist any kind of unwatchable dreck on an unsuspecting public). The problem with this movie is that, not only is not very competently made, but it's not just entertaining on any level(even an unintentional one).

The current version of this "Island Fury" is actually TWO lame movies--a wrap-around story which looks to have been shot around the time of the film's 1989 release, and the main story which was filmed earlier in the 80's (1983 I guess). In the frame story two older teenage girls are on vacation in the Far East when they are lured off on a treasure hunt to an island where it turns out they'd been years earlier when they were children with one of the girl's older sister and the sister's teenage/college age friends. This is the main story which involves the group running into a family of kindly old cannibals.

The plot is pretty pedestrian. The acting is terrible (having ten-year-old protagonists might be novel if they weren't even worse actresses than your usual teenage horror fodder). Compared to the protagonists the elderly cannibals aren't bad, but as the villains they really needed to be far more compelling. One of the older girls in the main story is played by Kirsten Baker who played a skinny-dipping, extreme short-shorts wearing camp counselor/"Jason" victim in "Friday the 13th Part II". She has a very nice bikini-clad ass. I say this not to be a sexist pig (well, not JUST to be a sexist pig), but because this movie is so frickin' boring I spent all my time staring at it whenever it was on screen (which unfortunately wasn't very much). Baker's bikini-clad tail gives the movie's only really compelling performance (not even Baker herself, she is pretty somnambulistic). Of course, Baker's ass gave an even better (and un-bikini-clad) performance in "Friday the 13th II", and that was a much more entertaining movie to boot. I give the filmmakers an "A" for effort here, but I really hope they kept their day jobs. . .

Amateurish account of two young women abducted by thugs after the gold coin worn by one of them is recognised as a rare antiquity. After a lot of threats and intimidation, the girls finally agree to reveal the location of the treasure, recounting in flashback the horrific events they survived as a pair of precocious teenagers when their group was drugged and dismembered by a family of deranged maniacs on a remote island.

An earthquake, a bizarre ritualistic castration, random close-ups of cockroaches, a village idiot and a pair of not-so-wholesome old folks with sinister intentions are just a few of the dubious encounters you'll experience in this offbeat thriller. 30's cowboy staple Hank Worden looks frail but delivers his corn-fed dialogue ("I done got him that time granny, now how 'bout some pie") with professionalism, while the only other recognisable face is that of Kirsten Baker ("Friday the 13th Part II") in a frivolous (and topless) supporting role.

Low budget props and special effects (e.g. the sponge-dummy "body" lying on the ground in the barn when Todd is attempting his escape) earn a high camp value while a couple of gruesome meat hook / meat cleaver incidents and a gratuitous sex scene up the sadism ratio considerably. Quirky and amateurish, but curiously entertaining nonetheless, the film's legacy of wisdom is a warning to all: don't accept herbal tea from old folks.

This is a particularly inept and difficult film to watch. Like many other of the early-80s American horror films of the same bracket, there is little in the way of atmosphere or gore to keep one interested. At this particular time, the gulf between US and European low budget horror was enormous. This particular movie takes the worst from the contemporary US horror films (such as HALLOWEEN) and 50s monster movies and creates an absolutely lamentable waste of time. Don't bother.