Savage Island

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.

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!...

There's no getting around it: this one is trash of the most wretched, yet irresistible, variety. It takes two existing movies - "Orinoco: Prigioniere del Sesso" and "Femmine Infernali" (both 1980) - and tries to combine them into one "story". This story deals with scantily clad female prisoners in South America who are forced into being slave labour, and searching for emeralds. Some mercenaries come to their aid.

About 10 minutes of new framing material was shot featuring Linda Blair, who didn't want to deceive people into thinking she was the star, despite being prominently featured in the promotional materials. Linda plays Daly, out to seek revenge on dastardly businessman Luker (Leon Askin).

As you might imagine, this gets pretty incoherent, and after a while some viewers may just give up trying to make any sense of things and just go with the flow. The archive footage is plenty sleazy, and will very much satisfy the exploitation loving crowd. There is a lot of full frontal female nudity, and a fair bit of violence. Not only do people get shot, but they fall victim to snakes and leeches as well. The poor quality of the picture is certainly appropriate for this kind of material.

Linda and Leon are fun, as are a number of the foreign performers in the original movies. Among those you may recognize are Anthony Steffen, Ajita Wilson, and Luciano Pigozzi. Hell, there's even a cameo role for none other than Penn Jillette, as a not very competent security guard.

The violence, nudity, and frequent action scenes help to ensure that, while this may be dumb, it isn't boring.

Five out of 10.

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.