Le maître de Dragonard Hill

My review was written in June 1990 after watching the film on Media Home Entertainment video cassette.

This enjoyably trashy film in the "Mandingo" vein is a followup to Cannon's 1988 "Dragonard", reviewed for the record after its direct-to-video release in 1989. It had previously been screened in 1987 at the Cannes fest market.

South African-lensed effort is set across the globe in St. Kitts, picking up the action after a slave revolt led by white former slave Patrick Warburton. Now he's a happily married (to cute Kimberly Sissons) and everything looks peachy at their inherited plantation Dragonard Hill.

Hell breaks loose when local "easy" girl Arabella (played with wonderfully campy relish by Clauia Udy) is caught by her father making love to black slave Martin Dewee and daddy ends up dead. Dewee is blamed and Warburton's family gets in trouble when they give him refuge on the lam.

Evil Oliver Reed is appointed the new governor and brings back the use of the whip (called a "dragonard") on slaves. There's plenty of mayhem before the good guys revolt and put things right.

Besides Udy's un turn, there's a guest role for Herbert Lom as a friendly smuggler. Both he and Eartha Kitt (cast here as a brothel madam) previously appeared in the 1960s West German film of "Uncle Tom's Cabin".

Helmer Gerard Kikoine, whose output ranges from hardcore porn to Tony Perkins' "Edge of Sanity", pours on the sleaze. Funniest twist is final reel changeover in which nasty Udy suddenly sees the error of her ways and becomes a nice person in time for a rushed happy ending.

I haven't watched this for a long time, and trust me, the 7-star rating is solely for camp value--this movie is awful in a very entertaining way, right up there with "Drum" as far as its genre goes But the only reason I'm posting is to clarify: This is NOT a predecessor to "Dragonard." They are exactly the same movie, just under different titles. It's rare that IMBD makes such a big error, but I guess it's a testament to how badly this film flopped, and how little it's been seen since. Anyway, it's a major tasteless hoot if you are into unintentional comedy of a ripped-bodice, forbidden-plantation-desires-as-slaves-revolt type. With terribly overripe or wooden acting down the line, it's not your run-of-the-mill bad movie, but an underappreciated bad-movie classic, practically the "Showgirls" of "Mandingo" knockoffs.