Director: Joe D’Amato
Year: 1980
Country: Italy
Alternate Titles: The Grim Reaper; Anthropophagous: The Beast; The Savage Island; The Zombie's Rage
Genre: Slasher
Plot:
Going along on a trip with friends, an accident strands the group on a small island in the Greek Sea where the completely empty and almost abandoned town is found to be the home of a relentless and vicious killer after them forcing the group to find a way to fight him off to get away alive.
Review:
This one is a lot better than many give it credit for. One of the main reasons for this comes from an unexpected source of the old-school vibes it has spread throughout the film. It is nice to feature some old-school Gothic flavors mixed into a gore film, and we get a large amount of the usual trappings in here from candle-lit walks through darkened rooms, the winding corridors heading off seemingly forever, stormy nights banging in the distance, and a quite creepy scene where one character walks through a large tunnel using only a torch for light and comes across a large number of ancient skeletons lying in the walls of the catacombs. Coupled together with the knowledge of the group being stranded as well as the concept of the abandoned, deserted village full of rotting corpses, the old-school nature of the film goes hand-in-hand with the film's most infamous nature in the unrelenting gore, which is in abundance here.
There is a bloody machete in the head, a couple stabbings, a chunk of the neck bitten out, and a special scene that is the cause of its infamous nature. It's incredibly gory and comes as a complete shock when it happens, as it's not an expected scene in the situation going as far as it does. Beyond that, the film also does set up the story quite nicely, with the continuing revelations of the killer slowly coming to light in a series of coincidences and discoveries that shed some light on the killer during the final half which manages to raise this one quite nicely. As well as the frantic final chase around the house that has plenty of action and some more good gore, the film does have a few minor issues that hold it back somewhat.
The main issue here is that this is quite slow for the most part. It starts off quickly but then dangles for a while and nothing happens. Granted, the Gothic scenes are nice to watch, but only one has anything resembling a pay-off, leading to nervousness and then boredom as to when something is going to happen. The action comes in spurts as well, so it seems even slower than normal. When it needed to go for the jugular, it stopped to show an exercise in Gothic flavor that wasn't all that necessary and it does inter-cut with the flow of the film. The biggest flaw, though, is the killer. This is one of the less scary killers in history. Other than killing people, there really isn't anything done to him that makes him scary to viewers. His look is also a problem and the cheap make-up looks more like a mask which makes him look more laughable than anything. Otherwise, this one wasn't all that bad of an effort.
Overview: ***/5
Far better than it should be but still not without some issues, this Italian gore opus contains more than enough to be worthwhile while being kept from the upper echelons of the style due to those factors. Those who are fine with this style and don’t mind the factors present, appreciate this era of Italian genre cinema, or are fans of the creative crew will have the most to like as most others out there should heed caution.
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