L'isola degli uomini pesce

This movie surprised me. The box is misleading, the tagline is misleading and the costumes and tone of the film are misleading. The movie is quite gory, well-acted and beautifully shot. The special-effects are top-notch and seem to be ahead of their time, until you realize this movie came out in 1979, not in 1963 like it's tone would suggest. It is a unique take on the Dr. Moreau story, and one of the better versions filmed. The first fifteen minutes are the highlight and the most shocking, but the film doesn't ever really fall apart. Definitely worth-seeing if you are a fan of dramatic costume/horror classics and gore-fests.

I finally got a chance to settle in and compare the two versions of this film currently going around -- First, the good old scummy, sleazy Embassy VHS print called SCREAMERS, and then a new fully restored Italian DVD by everyone's new favorite media company, No Shame of Italy.

The American adverts about "men turned inside out" is as everyone says, totally misleading, and indicative of a Roger Cormanized take on what otherwise would be a superior fantasy-adventure thriller for grown ups. The complete Italian version is a somewhat sprawling, well designed and deliberately paced take on "Island of Dr. Moreau", and there's nothing wrong with that. It's a sumptuous, handsome Euro Horror outing with a brain, good plotting, character development, location shooting, period costuming and sets, etc.

But I must admit that the 14 year old knucklehead weed puffer still lurking somewhere inside of me got a bigger kick out of the more lurid, sleazy and unkempt Roger Corman version, which has some nice over the top gore, a flashy but preposterous opening segment, and then the bulk of Martino's original film, albeit somewhat abridged to make room for Roger's idea of entertainment. The pacing was somewhat quicker, the shock sequences closer together, and you see just as much of Ms. Bach's fantastic form as you do in the extended Italian version.

I still don't have much of an idea about what the specific story concerns though: there are a number of plot twists and incidental characters that were somewhat hard to keep track of. A local voodoo subplot didn't help much, and it's funny how everything culminates in just another fistfight between the noble castaway prisoner and the mad scientist ... Perhaps a few more viewings are in order. I will say this: Fans of the movie should avail themselves of one of these PAL imports and take a look at what is actually a movie rather than just another murky old home video -- the widescreen shot compositions once again reveal that Martino had an eye for filling his screen with interesting stuff. Nobody gets their heads ripped off like in the SCREAMERS print, but it's still interesting stuff, and once again proof that while his standards may have been pretty much confined to the area around the gutter, Roger Corman new good trashy fun when he had it made for him, and side by side these are actually better movies than they had to be.

7/10

Survivors of an ill-fated French vessel (Claudio Cassinelli, et al.) end up on a nameless Caribbean isle run by a self-appointed despot (Richard Johnson) who supports the dubious experiments of a sickly professor (Joseph Cotton). Barbara Bach is on hand as the latter's daughter.

"Screamers" (1981) is the recut American version of the Italian "Island of the Fishmen" (1979), which adds an unnecessary and irrelevant 12-minute prologue to beef up the horror, as well other negligible changes. People usually say "Screamers" is the superior version, but I've never seen the original to compare the two.

In any case, this is an adventure/horror that mixes "Mysterious Island" (1961) and "The Island of Dr. Moreau" (1977) with the amphibian monsters of "Creature from the Black Lagoon" (1954) & "Humanoids from the Deep" (1980) yet with the Italian style (and cast) of "The Great Alligator" (1979). Whilst this is the least of these, it's not far off. If you're in the mood for deserted island adventure mixed with horror you can't go wrong.

Regrettably, except for Bach's face and the blonde in the prologue, there's little feminine appeal. The creators needed to study the wise usage of Beth Rogan in "Mysterious Island" (1961) and Dana Gillespie in "The People that Time Forgot" (1977).

The film runs about 1 hour, 30 minutes, and was shot in Sardinia & Nuoro, Italy, with interiors done in Rome. The fog-laden night prologue was shot in Bronson Canyon, Griffith Park, Los Angeles; the volcanic shots were done in Maui, Hawaii.

GRADE: C+

Screamers is an Italian fantasy film (L'Isola degli Uomini Pesce) bought by Roger Corman and released through his New World Pictures. Of course Corman has to carve his initials on it by having one of his lackeys (Dan T. Miller) direct some additional gore footage before he has it released in the states.

L'Isola degli Uomini Pesce is a very entertaining retelling of the Island of Dr. Moreau. It is 1891 and Claudio Cassinelli is shipwrecked on a mysterious island with a few newly escaped convicts. Claudio comes across the stellar Barbara Bach and Richard Johnson. Johnson plays the dastardly Edmund Rackham: a man who is able to manipulate scientist Joseph Cotton into turning the local native population into amphibious deep-sea diving creatures, (they look like a cross between the Black Lagoon creature and one of The Humanoids From the Deep), by convincing Cotton that the mutations are being created for the highest of scientific and humanitarian motives.

Having discovered the lost city of Atlantis, Rackham is using the amphibious creatures to loot its treasures. Sexy Barbara Bach plays Cotton's daughter who has a psychic link with these mutations. In one memorable scene, Bach takes a midnight swim with these mutants wearing only a thin white cotton dress that leaves little to the imagination. Claudio discovers one of the convicts he has befriended has been turned into a gill-creature and then all Hell breaks loose.

Filmed at the same time and in the same location as Zombi 2, Richard Johnson didn't even have to change suits between films. The house where the experiments take place is the same house Johnson uses to conduct experiments in Zombi 2. Talk about economic filmmaking!

The additional footage features a few bloody beheadings, (way to go Roger!), and a laughably bad Cameron Mitchell doing his best pirate imitation. All that's missing is the parrot.

Spanish title: Le Continent Des Hommes Poissons

This is a very enjoyable lost island adventure movie. A group of men are shipwrecked on an island ruled by a white "master" accompanied by an attractive white woman (Barbara Bach), inhabited by voodoo-practicing natives as well as some CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON type "fish men". The plot is silly (as in most movies of this type), the acting and the lines are cheesy in most cases, but it is a v-e-r-y polished-looking effort. The scene of Barbara Bach secretly leaving her manor at dawn (or dusk), crossing a shallow lake, and feeding the fish men a potion on the seashore is especially very poetic looking. The undersea footage of the ruins of Atlantis is also very impressive. One minor defect: the voodoo subplot seems to go nowhere. Surely, there are elements of THE ISLAND OF DR MOREAU in the plot, but I think the idea to make this movie was kicked off by previous year's WARLORDS OF ATLANTIS from Britain. By the way, I think the "man whose inside turned outside" tag-line in the movie's US publicity refers to the scene of a man in the lab tank who is slowly being mutated towards a fish man.