Mystery on Monster Island (1981)

I give this trainwreck a "7" just because the group I watched it with had such a good time HOWLING with laughter at how horrible it all was - everything is wrong - the direction, the acting, the "special" effects, etc. Two vets like Stamp and Cushing take the money and run - they are barely in it - the two male leads are like oil and water - one guy is dead eyed and no energy and the other David Hatton overacts so much you are stunned at the hammy performance. He must have known how bad the thing was so he decided to give a 1000% to make up for the lame script and bad effects - he acts with his eyes, he acts with his eyebrows, he acts with his MOUSTACHE - he plays the nervous, sniveling kind of sissy character that was very popular in comedies from 1930's and 1940's (Edward Everret Horton usually played them) but the thing is.....THIS MOVIE IS MADE IN THE 1980's!!!! We laughed so hard when the "dinosaur" monster finally showed up - it is so bad, so not real, so not scary that we saluted the filmmaker for even yelling "Action" - wow - is it lame and then the scene where they encounter giant caterpillars is also unintentionally hilarious. So for fans of Grade Z cheese, pull up a chair and laugh - for those looking for a good old fashioned Jules Verne adventure - you are out of luck,.

Unfortunately, this one constituted another gaffe within my ongoing Halloween challenge since it's not really a horror film despite title, director (he'd later make the gory PIECES [1983]) and presence of genre icons Peter Cushing and Paul Naschy! In fact, it's a typical Jules Verne adventure (based on his much-filmed "Mysterious Island") which proves surprisingly palatable – thanks also to a lively score – though unbalanced by comedy relief from the youthful hero's bumbling/cowardly sidekick, a Professor of Elocution whose name is constantly mispronounced ("T. Artelet not tartlet!").Cushing is the protagonist's rich uncle who has purchased an island, to which the boy is sent and where he meets a variety of dangers (pirates, cannibals, monsters) – eventually, there's a twist with respect to most of these, which thankfully explains the sheer poverty of the creatures on display! On the other hand, Naschy has a very small role at the start as a man who has struck gold – which is then coveted by his associates. The latter include Terence Stamp who, for obvious reasons, was Cushing's chief rival for the acquisition of the island; later on, he turns up on it (ludicrously shrouded from top to bottom complete with anachronistic goggles!) with his bandit horde to take the gold by force – to this end, he even plants a female 'shipwreck victim' to lure the hero into divulging the loot's whereabouts.Coupled with the far better GORILLA AT LARGE (1954; see above) on Fox's-by-way-of-MGM "Midnite Movies" banner, it offers the film both in English and Spanish. At first, always the stickler for a film's native country being its original language, I started watching the film in Spanish but when a narrator began translating the credits into Spanish and the English subtitles proved to be of the descriptive "hard of hearing" variety, I soon gave up my puritan pretensions and watched it with the more 'user friendly' English soundtrack on. At least, one does get to hear Cushing and Stamp reciting their own lines this way...

You have got to be kidding me. I saw this on sky TV and this is not a comedy, just a low budget crap about tribes and weird creatures. The sea creature was a toy because i can tell from looking at it. The caterpillar is some train like robot. The dinosaurs are stuffed animals man. The Dino's didn't even walk proply, man. I couldn't even tell it was a dinosaur. The sea creature could have been better but he just looks like a man in a werewolf costume. The story is boring and the tribes are really weird. Don't watch this, this is just about people trapped in the island from stuffed animals and a tribe. I give it a 1 out of 10. Not funny. NOT CREATIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

OK, I watched 20'000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA, MYSTERIOUS ISLAND, and CAPTAIN NEMO AND THE UNDERSEA CITY, and they were good. But this one is pretty poor. Yet it was kind of silly, and a little cartoonish. The professor gets hit, and you here a "Buh-oooiii-iiinnnggg" kind of noise (hey I heard that noise in SESAME STREET). The monsters in this film are pretty bad and lame. You see beasts that look like a combination between the gill man and a baboon. A big monster that looks like a combination between an allosaurus and a gorilla (how did they do that, a man in a suit, a robot)?Weird. Glops of sea weed that come to life. It looks like a bunch of SIGMUND AND THE SEA MONSTERS rejects. And caterpillers that blow steam. I thought this was a "creatures from lost worlds" kind of fantasy, but at the end, everything was joke island. The music in certain scenes like the chase scenes with the thieves sounded like cartoon music of the early 80's. The set where the hero and company were chased in a cave resembles the cave from the 1960 remake of THE LOST WORLD. Since the movie was called JULES VERNE'S MYSTERY ON MONSTER ISLAND, how come you see beautiful birds or harmless monkeys. I was expecting some prehistoric life forms. As Blockbuster Video Movie Guide says, "stick to MYSTERIOUS ISLAND". This film (like KING KONG ESCAPES) is not available on video, but you can tape it on the Sci-Fi channel.