Moviecut—Voodoo Island

source: Voodoo Island

Voodoo Island

Phillip Knight(Boris Karloff)makes a living writing books that debunk superstitions, curses and the such. He is hired by a mega-rich industrialist to prove that an island in the Pacific is safe enough to build a future resort in spite of mysterious disappearances. You can bet that real estate prices plummet after the discovery of carnivorous plants and roaming zombies. Really nothing to see that is horribly frightening. Your imagination is suppose to do that for you; although the score by Les Baxter is superb in the category of creepiness. Actually not a bad movie; Karloff himself stoic and bit mysterious...and he's the good guy. Familiar B-movie stalwarts fill the rest of the cast: Elisha Cook Jr., Rhodes Reason, Beverly Tyler, Joan Engstrom and Herbert Patterson.

Writer, TV host and debunker Phillip Knight (Boris Karloff) is hired to investigate a South Pacific island where people have mysteriously disappeared. He takes along a bunch of obnoxious stereotypical characters. When he gets there he discovers zombies, man-eating trees and hostile natives. Slow and VERY boring movie. The movie is more than half over before they even GET to the island! There's endless talking and tramping about a jungle, stupid looking "man-eating" trees and a totally unnecessary love story shoehorned in. The dialogue is terrible and the story goes nowhere. The only good parts of the movie are good acting by Karloff and Elisha Cook, hunky Rhodes Reason is good to look at, there's a good music score by Les Baxter and, in a surprise subplot, Claire (Jean Engstrom) is clearly a lesbian and hits on the one other woman in the expedition (Beverly Tyler)! Still it doesn't make this worth sitting through.

I've seen worse programmers. Boris Karloff brings class to anything he works in. It's fun just to watch him. His ill-health hadn't yet slowed him down and he was a real presence. Elisha Cook also gives an excellent performance. I think I know how the lesbian undertones between the two women got by (though the tones weren't that "under"). If it had been a big budget picture, the censors would have been on it like white on rice. As a low-budget picture it came in under the radar. Several of the actors do rise above the material. Actually it reminds me of some of the TV shows being churned out about the same time. They, too, didn't have much of a budget. What adds to the TV feeling are some of the actors, such as Rhodes Reason and Mervyn Vye, who were mainstays of '50s television.

Carnivorous plants and zombies supply the chief menace for the principals in Voodoo Island... There's no attempt at explaining how various mysterious things happen in the script, but the thriller gimmicks come off with Reginald LeBorg's direction. Aubrey Schenck-Howard W. Koch production was lensed on Kauai Island, Hawaii, so backgrounds have a helpful freshness as the characters are put through plot perils. Karloff doesn't have to exert himself much to handle his standard character...Elisha Cook and Beverly Tyler hold up the supporting roles. None of the performances is more than stock.

This movie was kind of sad to watch, because Karloff is a much better actor than this kind of tripe. It is always a sad commentary when the actors care more about the quality of a movie than the writers, directors and producers, who just were happy to tack Karloff's name on this turkey and run with it... Okay, apparently, the writers didn't know anything about Voodoo, other than Voodoo dolls and Zombies. They didn't know enough to know that Voodoo happens in the Caribbean, not in the South Pacific. I think this might have been an excuse for everyone to go to Hawaii... So the characters land on this island and encounter these man-eating plants that resemble... well, I won't tell you what they look like other than to say I am amazed they got past the censors in 1959. Apparently these plants feed by people being so dumb as to walk right into them, not only the explorers, but apparently, natives on this island as well...