Savage Island

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.

"...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

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.

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.

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.