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Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Island of Blood (1982)

... aka: Scared Alive
... aka: Whodunit
... aka: Whodunit?

Directed by:
William T. Naud

There's a lot of interest in a certain small, uninhabited and valuable island where a historic old school sits. It is currently owned by a wealthy old widow. At the end of the summer, she plans on donating it to her church for a tax break but until then she's renting it out. A film crew decides to bite. A few days before the entire crew is to arrive to begin shooting, pretentious director / writer Franklin Phlem (Ron Gardner) and sleazy producer Steve Faith (Terence Goodman) decide to have some of the inexperienced cast out for a few days rehearsal. Instead of the expected low-budget horror flick, the director wants to make an uplifting, positive rock musical about a band putting on a charity show to raise money for a school's music program. After all, he's sick of all the slasher-gore junk of the early 80s and wants to remind audiences that "not everyone is an exploiter or a sex maniac or a murderer." Much of the budget was put up by the completely untalented Betty Jean (Bari Suber), or BJ for short, who's just inherited a million bucks from her deceased sugar daddy and has secured the lead role simply because she's chipping in part of the money.





Amongst the group are trained dancer Donna (Marie-Alise Recasner), injured actress Lyn (Jeanine Marie), who hobbles around on crutches, womanizing "hunk" Rick (Richard Helm), who manages to get several of the ladies into the sack, and the geeky John (Jim Piper), who likes to lurk in the basement wearing a mask and scaring people with a cardboard machete. There are also three members of a rock band who got the gig because one of them - Phil (Steven Tash) - is "sponging off the no talent broad." The other two are Taylor (Gary Phillips), a stoned junkie who keeps going on about the end of the world and the bomb, and Jim (Rick Dean), a jittery, depressed drunk who'd had a nervous breakdown earlier. And since every slasher flick needs a creepy, grouchy old guy, this one gives up cook and island caretaker Bert ("Red" / Jared McVay), who's always lurking around clutching a butcher knife and hates the younger generation because they're "food-picky drug freaks." The characters are all pretty miserable and unlikable and the movie refuses to really give us a hero or heroine worth rooting on or caring about. I suppose it's one thing to have no clue who's going to survive the night but it's probably an even worse thing not even caring who does.





Phil heads out to the pool to go for a swim and discovers it's full of boiling water. Someone sneaks up on him, pushes him in and he's boiled alive. The incident is blamed on a broken thermostat. Uh huh. There's no phone on the island to contact the authorities, nobody demands to leave and Franklin just writes him out of the script, noting "we'll save a bundle of money!" For dinner, Bert serves everyone boiled lobster to bring to mind their fallen friend. Later that evening, Taylor gets a spear through his neck. The killer carries around a walkman that plays a rock song describes each of the murders. The song is called "Face to Face" and the lyrics keep changing: "Boil Me, Boil Me, Boil Me, Face to Face," "Spear Me, Spear Me, Spear Me, Face to Face," etc. No one really seems to pay Taylor's disappearance much mind. The caretaker and the producer finally decide to head back to the mainland to report the one death but the boat (their only way off the island) blows up and kills both of them.





Donna has had it with the "fish-faced honky director man" and starts packing her bags but she unwisely decides to clean up first and gets melted when someone pumps battery acid into the shower. This is enough to finally convince who's left that there is a killer amongst them. Everyone starts questioning everyone else. People start fighting. The power generator goes out. People act like complete dumb asses, refuse to stay together and start wandering off by themselves to get killed. Despite there being a psycho on the loose, one couple decide to have sex, which ends prematurely when he's stabbed up through the bed with a machete. Hands are sliced off, there's a chainsaw to the crotch and (off-screen) death by nail gun but unfortunately the lighting is so horribly dark you can barely make any of this out. We basically get people wandering around in the dark holding candles, seeing the killer and screaming as a murder weapon is raised and then some blur of their dead body falls into frame. It's downright boring. My mind just started to wander off. I began peeling the sticker off my lighter and rubbing off the sticky residue.. and then started reading my Mt. Dew label... and then I learned that the Mt. Dew I was drinking had brominated vegetable oil in it.... and then I wondered how brominated vegetable oil differed from regular vegetable oil... and why my spell check marked brominated as a nonexistent word. When I glanced back up at the screen, some guy was talking about making snuff movies and a chick shot him. The end.





A pretty dreadful and understandably forgotten slasher flick, this is slow as hell, dull as hell, completely unoriginal, poorly and amateurishly written, acted and directed. The Make-Up Effects Lab (who also created many of the "real" gore scenes in the Faces of Death movies) did some of the fx, but most are too difficult to see because of the poor lighting. Rick Dean is really the only notable name in the cast. Mr. Dean wouldn't make another movie until almost ten years after this one but then reemerged in the 90s playing essentially the same role he plays in this one: a creepy weirdo. Jimmy Williams, best known by me as the guy Michelle Bauer sawed to pieces in HOLLYWOOD CHAINSAW HOOKERS (1987), shows up at the very end as a police officer. The actress playing Lyn, who is billed as "Jeanine Marie" looked awfully familiar, too, but I couldn't quite place her.





It was filmed in 1982 under the title Whodunit and was also released as Scared Alive. It about bored me dead. A VHS was released by the short-lived Applause Video but there's no legitimate DVD release. No big loss.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I honestly would not want to meet the person who had good things to say about this movie. I tried three times in 10 years to watch this and I always ejected in the first 30 minutes. Plus, my 50 cent copy was a cut box, so eventually, I just threw it in the garbage.

Sinful said...

Hey there,
I enjoy you blog very much and because of that, I have tagged you for a Liebster Blog Award! http://ow.ly/cZOVO
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The Bloody Pit of Horror said...

Oh yes, IOB was borderline torturous. Believe it or not, I HAVE seen positive reviews for it. I was like "WTF are you smoking?"

The Bloody Pit of Horror said...

Thanks Christopher. I filled it all out. :)

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