I Escaped from Devil's Island (1973)

Up until when the 4 prisoners escape and end up in another island, the movie is tolerable enough, although at the rather heavy price of forgiving quite a number of flaws in both the story as well as the movie making style ...but when they reach the leper colony and then Jim Brown 'wins' that village woman after he kills her husband in self-defense and the movie starts copying the famous (mostly fake stories) book and its movie Papillon almost frame by frame, i just quit watching it seriously and started checking my emails and Facebook account and doing other stuff ... (and i wouldn't have given it more than 3/10 * anyway! actually, even the movie Papillon itself isn't much of a thing really compared to its book but it does beat this one surely, which was screened about a month after the original reportedly ... such a rip off indeed!)all n all, if people want to make porn but they're not sure if it will sell as much as a big screen adventure movie mixed with some low grade nude scenes and cheap sex, take my advice: quit doing both if you're as untalented as the one who made this movie and think of more secure daytime job or something! (how 'bout an associate position in one of Amazon's warehouses?)

I remember in that multi flashback film Passage To Marseilles, Humphrey Bogart led a group of Devil's Island convicts with the clear purpose of escaping to fight for France even after the Nazis have taken it over. No such unity of purpose exists among four convicts who escape in 1916 to the mainland of French Guiana in I Escaped From Devil's Island. No talk here about going home to fight for France among the four who make it out. Perhaps they'd gotten word about Verdun.The four in this film are Jim Brown, Christopher George, Rick Ely, and James Luisi. Other than Devil's Island isn't exactly a tropical paradise they all have different reasons for wanting to leave. George in fact is a political prisoner, an anti-war pacifist and he wants to continue to do his political thing. In a place as brutal as Devil's Island he learns that pacifism sometimes just doesn't cut it.Ely's character is an interesting one, he's a gay man and in the all male Devil's Island he and his fellow gay prisoners are quite a premium, they're known as 'fancy boys' and command a lot for their services to relieve sexual tension among the prisoners. Still all that demand all that service leave Ely a bit on edge.The brothers Corman did this film and befitting the locale and the subject there's a lot of erotic sadism. I Escaped From Devil's Island is trashy and exploitive, but still somewhat fun to watch.

There are many stories arising from the infamous and nightmarish prison on French Guiana. This film, " I escaped From Devil's Island " is one of them. If one is not too critical, which is easy, then the movie is good entertainment as it's got several ingredients of a plausible and brutal prison scenario. It has harsh treatment, unconscionable deaths and the social turmoil of a savage structure gone wild. Still, it endeavors to please. The star of the film is acclaimed athlete Jim Brown who plays Labras, which is strange as he is listed on the IMDb board as a minor player. He and Christopher George, Richard Ely and James Luisi execute an escape which is desperate and clumsy at best. With Major Marteau (Paul Richards) chasing them from the island to the mainland, makes for exciting pursuit. In addition the pretty sexy local distractions they meet along the way, proves that brief nudity might make up for a lackluster script. As a result and despite the convoluted story which lacks necessary elements, the movie ends up becoming a poor-man's Papillon. Nevertheless, I think it tries hard to entertain and I would give it an 'A' for effort. ***

I saw this way back in 1983 when it was shown late one night on television , and I`m talking network televison in those days you didn`t have satillite or cable at least not in Britain where we were confined to a total of 4 channels. And the most shocking thing was that it contained very strong language , back then very very few films shown on television had swearing left intact but here it was untouched which was amazing when nearly every sentence contains the word " F*** " though much of the gore and gay sex seems to have been edited ( And badly edited at that ) for transmission especially a shark attack scene where it cuts to a shark fin then cuts to a man waving his bloody stump at the camera then cuts to a couple of fingers floating about the water , very strange and I ESCAPED FROM DEVILS ISLAND also has that low budget production value feel seen so often in video nasties that I can`t help feel that it in unedited form it would would be classed as a video nasty .Despite its flaws it`s a lot of fun , I can put my hand on heart and say I enjoyed it far more than PAPILLION and we get to see a sadistic guard who calls homosexuals bad names while twisting their nipples . Can`t get more sadistic than that