Savage Island (1985)

... aka: Banished Women
... aka: Paluu helvetistä (Return from Hell)
... aka: Prisioneiras da Ilha Selvagem (Prisoners of Wild Island)
... aka: Prison Island

Directed by:
"Nicholas Beardsley" (Ted Nicolaou)
Edoardo Mulargia (uncredited)

Charles Bands' Empire Pictures acquired the U.S. release rights to the sleazy Italian / Spanish women-in-prison films Femmine infernali (aka ESCAPE FROM HELL) and Orinoco: Prigioniere del sesso (aka Orinoco: Prison of Sex or HOTEL PARADISE), which were filmed back-to-back and released in 1980. Wizard Video issued the former on home video under the title Escape in 1984, but didn't release the second of the two as is. Instead, they cobbled together some footage from it, some footage from Escape and added about 15 minutes of bookmarking footage plus narration in an attempt to tie it all together, thus creating this third “new” movie. Some new credits were attached that managed to incorrectly match nearly all of the original films' stars to the wrong roles. Someone then whipped up a poster featuring Linda Blair (“star” of the new footage) in a skimpy bathing suit holding an Uzi and called it Savage Island. Island was released to theaters in 1985 and made its way onto home video later that same year on the Empire sub label Force Video. Needless to say, the entire thing is such a huge mess that both the director and Band ("Robert Amante") opted for aliases.

We open with the buried-girl-killed-by-python death from Escape, before meeting the well-dressed Ms. Daly (Blair). She steps out of a car, scowls, walks into a high rise office building, encounters a security guard and puts a bullet in the head after he insists she sign the register. This broad means business! The guard, by the way, is played by comedian / magician Penn Jillette in his film debut and he gets to spit out about three lines before he's shot dead. Daly goes upstairs, insists on seeing Mr. Luker (Leon Askin) and is soon holding him at gunpoint recounting her story. Daly was one of a hundred female prisoners promised shorter sentences if they went to work for Luker's island camp. “What they didn't tell me was that one week on your Emerald Island is like a thousand years in the shittiest South American hole!,” Blair angrily informs him. Turns out Daly along with the rest of the women were treated little better than slaves, plus were regularly tortured and killed. Since her escape two years earlier, Daly put together a plan to overthrow Emerald Island and she's managed to finally pull it off. We then jump back “four days ago” to see how it all went down as Blair occasionally chirps in to narrate.

We meet prisoner Maria (Cristina Lay), who's on a transport boat headed to the work camp being captained by Orinoco (Stelio Candelli). Though Maria claims she's there for “stealing from a fat old bitch and her sex starved husband,” she's actually Daly's partner going undercover. Cutting across the jungle in hopes of intercepting the boat is Daly's other partner Laredo (Anthony Steffen). He, along with a bunch of hired jewel thieves, end up clashing with Orinoco's group. They kill the guards and Laredo convinces Orinoco and his men to come over to their side by promising he'll be paid handsomely for his efforts. Pretty much exactly how it went down in Hotel Paradise only with some slight changes. The gang finally arrive at the prison, the ladies are thrown in with the wolves while the guys do their conspiring without so much as breaking a fingernail until the very end.

After Maria meets her new cellmates Muriel (Ajita Wilson), Mary (Maite Nicote) and Kate (Cintia Lodetti), the girls go to work mining for emeralds while lash happy guards walk around barking out things like “Quit fuckin' around fat ass!” and “You good for nothing bitches!” This very much keeps in tune with the original films' near-constant parade of nudity, including the nude cat fights, nude torture, nude stream bathing, lounging around the cell in the nude and, rather ingeniously, combining the outdoor shower scene from Escape and the outdoor shower scene from Hotel to make an even longer shower scene. However, while this does keep in much of the full female nudity, it gets rid of the more explicit shots present in the originals plus removes all of the soft-core sex and rape scenes. The nastier torture and whipping scenes didn't make the cut either, likely so this could secure a U.S. R rating.

What this film cannot do is combine two different films with similar yet slightly different plots and still keep everything coherent. Just as the credits themselves are jacked up, this hatchet-job (which was mostly re-dubbed for this release) switches around characters and character names like it's nothing. One actor who played a sadistic guard in Escape but one of the heroic revolutionaries in Hotel starts out as a heroic revolutionary with one name but then becomes a sadistic guard with another name that was already given to one of the other guards. At least three different characters are called Paco at various points and this keeps both the sadistic warden from Escape (played by Luciano Pigozzi) AND the sadistic warden from Hotel (played by Luciano Rossi), so depending on the scene it's impossible to tell who's even running this place. For the record, the majority of the recycled footage seen here comes from Hotel, though this finishes out by putting both of the films' big finales back to back!

We then return to Daly, who demands the jewels in Luker's safe as compensation for the hell she and her friends went through. She snarls out a few one-liners (“All that horror for two little bags of green SHIT!”), shoots both Luker and his bodyguard (Dirk Kancilia) dead and then gets what she came for. The end.

Watching this misbegotten project made me wonder why in the hell they didn't just release the superior Hotel Paradise as is with a few needed cuts since they'd already done that with Escape. It likely boiled down to it not having any kind of name recognition here in the states. Perhaps it was a smart business decision and being able to promote the film using Blair's name made it more profitable than it otherwise would have been. Either way, her screen time amounts to less than 10 minutes and she reportedly filmed all of her scenes in a single day. The editing, continuity and new dialogue are all terrible, the transfer of the original footage is way too dark (the night scenes are almost impossible to make out) and, despite the enticing poster, Linda's never on a beach in a bathing suit brandishing a gun. Afterward, you may feel compelled to cleanse your palate with a viewing of Chained Heat. Hell, Red Heat even.

★1/2

Profondo rosso (1975)

... aka: Deep Red
... aka: Deep Red Hatchet Murders
... aka: Dripping Deep Red
... aka: Hatchet Murders, The
... aka: Les frissons de l'angoisse (Shivers of Angst)
... aka: Rojo profundo
... aka: Rosso - Die Farbe des Todes (Red: The Color of Death)
... aka: Suspiria Part 2

Directed by:
Dario Argento

Lithuanian psychic Helga Ulmann (Macha Meril) appears at a paranormal presentation taking place in Rome. After she gives a brief demonstration of her powers, she's overcome with feelings of terror as she sees visions of a child singing, blood and death. There's a murderer in the audience. Through her visions, Helga also believes she can identify the psycho. She returns home to gather her thoughts and write down her visions for the police but doesn't get a chance to give anything to them. The psycho has found her. He / she breaks in, murders her with a hatchet and takes her papers. While that's going on, British jazz musician Marcus Daly (David Hemmings) is heading home after a long night of practicing for an upcoming show. He hears Helga's scream and sees the very end of her murderer thought a window, which includes in the usual Argento head-crashes-through-glass climax. Marcus manages to catch a brief glimpse of the raincoat-clad killer running away plus believes the killer stole a painting from the house.

After going through the paces with the police, who naturally question his recollections about the evening's event, Marcus finds himself “fascinated by the whole event” and starts looking into matters all on his own. He gets in way over his head in the process... especially when the killer shows up at his apartment looking for him. Giving him an additional headache is the presence of journalist Gianna Brezzi (Daria Nicolodi), an annoying combination of nosy, overly-peppy journalist and pseudo feminist. She'd like to work with Marcus but, after bruising his ego beating him at arm wrestling, he passes. As a retort, she threatens to start her own parallel investigation and does just that, though the two eventually decide to start helping each other out.

Other characters flutter in and out of the main story, including Marcus' friend and fellow musician Carlo (Gabriele Lavia), a depressed gay drunk with a transsexual lover who tries to discourage Marcus from sticking his nose into the investigation and suggest he leave town, as well as Carlo's kooky mother Marta (Clara Calamai), a former movie star forced to quit the business by her controlling husband. And then there's Professor Giordani (Glauco Mauri), a psychiatrist with an interest in parapsychology who was “keeping” Helga and eventually helps in the investigation, much to his detriment. Children's book author Amanda Righetti (Giuliana Calandra) had written a book that may have inspired the killer. Bardi (Piero Mazzinghi), the caretaker of a certain spooky decaying mansion has an imbalanced daughter named Olga (Nicoletta Elmi) who gets her kicks torturing lizards.

Clues lead Marcus first to a haunting children's song he hears being played when the killer shows up at his place, which then leads to a book on urban legends and folklore, which then leads to an abandoned house that used to be the home of a German ghost story writer who'd long since passed away, which then leads to a school housing some important drawings. As Marcus tries to piece the clues together and avoid being killed himself, a number of the supporting characters get bumped off in gruesome ways that involve a face seriously scalded by hot water, a head getting squashed by a car, decapitation via elevator and some major dental damage after an open mouth is slammed into a mantle and desk, plus a few garden variety stabbings. (The alternate title The Hatchet Murders is a bit misleading as there's actually only one murder by hatchet and the butcher knife used isn't even called a hatchet here in America.)

Profondo rosso is generally considered one of the director's finest films and it's easy to see why. This ably combines an engrossing mystery plot with bloody and elaborately staged murder sequences and has a better screenplay and slightly more developed characters (including a male lead who acts human for a change and exhibits fear and confusion in the proper places) than his usual, plus a unique and memorable (albeit sometimes grating) music score from Giorgio Gaslini and Goblin. Though there's some clunker dialogue (“There's somebody in the house...g...uh... a-absolutely trying to kill me, ya know?”) and it lags a bit here and there, it more than makes up for that with impressive horror / suspense set pieces, which are stylish, imaginatively shot, sometimes pretty startling (two words: creepy doll) and range from good to downright brilliant.

Argento fans will eat up the various camera shots, the fact the camera seldom stays put and odd camera placements throughout, which include several long close-up shots prowling around a table looking at various objects, low level POV shots gliding along the floor, a shot titling into a spinning record album, a shot following a blade down into a victim and an exterior crane shot of a house. The cinematographer was Luigi Kuveiller, who'd previously shot those sleazy, campy Andy Warhol-produced adaptations of Dracula and Frankenstein.

Originally conceived as La tigre dai denti a sciabola (“The Sabre-Toothed Tiger”), this started life as a 500 page (!) script written by Argento, which was then whittled down to around 320 pages with help from Bernardino Zapponi. After shooting was complete, the full running time clocked in at 126 minutes, which isn't hard to believe knowing Argento very well could have spent 30 pages describing a single elaborate camera shot. 126 minutes was deemed too long by many distributors, so it was cut considerably in certain markets. Many feel the 105 minute version actually flows best, as it removes most of the dialogue that has no real bearing on the plot (notably excessive playful banter between Hemmings and Nicolodi) yet retains the gorier moments provided by makeup artists Germano Natali and Carlo Rambaldi.

Having previously seen only the hacked up U.S. version, what I ended up watching this time was the 126 minute version and several scenes really do feel unnecessary and / or go on for too a bit long. While I liked some of the Hemmings / Nicolodi scenes, I certainly wouldn't miss any of the scenes with the dumb police superintendent (Eros Pagni).

After Argento's follow-up Suspiria (1977) hit it big, Deep Red saw a re-release in numerous countries and was even re-titled Suspiria 2 in several places, like Japan. Argento himself oversaw the R-rated reduced cut that was released theatrically here in America and elsewhere. Because over 20 minutes of footage was removed prior to the film being dubbed into English, later DVD / BR releases from distributors like Anchor Bay and Blue Underground present an “uncut version” that's mostly been dubbed in English but with bits of dialogue here and there in Italian.

★★★1/2