Return to Treasure Island (1954)

Derring-do hampered by lackadaisical direction and a less then gripping story. Still not bad in a colorful Saturday morning matinée way with a handsome hero and lovely leading lady.Part of the problem is that after an initial skirmish the villains and the supposedly imperiled couple rarely intersect, it's almost as if they are on separate islands in their search for the loot until the very last minute. Even at a brief 75 minute running time it seems to take everyone forever to achieve the goal of tracking down the loot. As an actor and narrator Tab Hunter is very beautiful. His blonde shirtless attractiveness is a nice distraction but his line readings are so flat and his reactions to almost every situation so non-reactive he makes you yearn for the over the top scenery chewing of Robert Newton in the original Treasure Island.

The two interests of the film : Tab Hunter shirtless and following the story of his shoes and stripy socks, they keep disappearing and reappearing throughout the movie. Before the fight is barefoot, then he suddenly has shoes, when captured they take his shoes off, he escapes barefoot, but back in the rocks his shoes reappear, then disappear, sometimes with socks sometimes not, terrible continuity. He's acting is not bad, excepted for his awful Voice-over, here to help us understand a film with pretty bad "mise en scene", there's lots of tiring and pointless trips back and forth to the ships , too many baddies, a pretty funny special effect where a boat is supposed to explore, we see an explosion but the boat remains then when the camera changes angle disappear. There is also a random love story, that comes out of nowhere just so that tab hunter can kiss a girl in order to get teenage girls to swoon, before they yawn back to boredom the next scene. Adams is beautiful and Hunter is jaw breaking gorgeous but when they're off screen it gets UN interesting . The locations are not cinematic, or maybe it's all due to the bad framing, it's kind of entertaining in bits and because the whole narration is hilariously bad, a good film to watch when you're hungover

Since this mishmash of a movie is nearly incomprehensible, I'll exercise my powers of simplification to review it. Just as there are island nations today whose entire economies are based on centuries' worth of deposited bird droppings, in the past there have been "treasure islands" where a mother lode of a rare mineral provoked conflict between gangs or even nations of men. Since RETURN TO TREASURE ISLAND is a very low-budget flick, there are no armies or navies on display here. (When one of the two boats shown "blows up" and sinks, the special effects would not even do justice to a Muppets movie.) The islet featured in this brief film has been the stopping off place for Pirate hordes since the days of Roberto Clemente. In those long-ago days, their cans of grog came equipped with pull-rings, which got left on the beach by the billions when the buccaneers returned their empties for the deposits. Now, in a post-apocalyptic world, these once-overlooked bits of metal are crucial to humanity's survival. Therefore, Jim Hawkins' great great great granddaughter Jamisina recruits a handsome tab hunter to garner the aluminum jackpot before the orcs can melt it down. If you've been to treasure island once, now's the time to return!

Peachy Jamesina "Jamie" Hawkins, femme descendant of guess who, is lured by Porter Hall into taking a jaunt to Treasure Island to find the loot that was overlooked back in 1753. (She's English, so maybe she never saw any Porter Hall movies. Her great-grandfather also trusted the wrong fellow at first.) On the island Jamie meets marooned sailor Tab Hunter (no shirt, bushy red beard) and together they fend off the bad guys while searching for the treasure. Basically kid-level programmer from UA, but Dawn Addams' fresh-faced good looks help quite a lot. OK 75 minute timewaster as long as you're not expecting Wallace Beery or Robert Newton to shiver your timbers.