Despite sounding like an Enid Blyton adventure, this Italian/UK co-production is actually a murder/mystery. Originally made as a TV series called simply Seagull Island, it was later released as a feature film, with the whole five episodes trimmed to a 1hr 42 mins runtime. Barbara - an English woman - receives a letter from her sister, Marianne, asking her to travel to Italy and meet her in Rome. When Barbara arrives she finds Marianne has booked out of her hotel unexpectedly, leaving no message. She enlists British Consul Martin to help search, and discovers Marianne may have travelled to Naples with English ex-pat millionaire David Malcom. However, Marianne is blind - and recent unsolved murders of other blind women lead Barbara and Martin to fear for her safety.
The three leads are British - Jeremy Brett (David Malcolm), Prunella Ransome (Barbara), and Nicky Henson (Martin). The rest of the cast are almost all Italian, with several faces/names familiar from genre/exploitation films of the 70s and 80s. The basic story's not bad, and the leads are good. However, it suffers badly from having so much material cut, leaving some continuity not making sense (e.g. Characters suddenly changing location), as well as dialogue obviously having been removed within scenes. Still, Brett manages to be as riveting as ever (four years later he would become immortalised as arguably the definitive Sherlock Holmes). There's very little gore (although we do get a pretty convincing shot of an eyeless corpse weighed down underwater by a concrete block), and almost no nudity. However, the stunning underwater photography deserves a mention, as does the score (by well-known UK TV theme composer, Tony Hatch). 4.5/10.
