Audience Member
Low budget nonsense with minimal scares but a cheesy feel that has its appeal to fans of 50's cinema.
Rated 2/5 Stars •
Rated 2 out of 5 stars
02/27/23
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Audience Member
Well this had a very underwhelming ending, i really don't get what the deal was. I suppose carnivorous rubber plants are mentally disturbing after all and it seems Jean Engstrom was doing the acting for both her AND the evil tentacle leaf things in the water. I particularly liked Murvyn Vye here, but what's with Boris Karloff standing extremely close to anyone he's conversing with? I hope he brushed his teeth. There's not much on offer here, just the stereotypical view of native pacific islanders practicing voodoo with dolls which is REALLY dumb.
Rated 1.5/5 Stars •
Rated 1.5 out of 5 stars
01/29/23
Full Review
Audience Member
My first question in watching this old Black & White Movie is what color is Boris Karloff suppose to be, In this movie he looks like he's a few shades darker then a white man and a lot of shades lighter then the native Hawaiians posing as pacific islanders. Anyway its another one of those so called movies where Boris is playing a role other then horror, rare how rare you ask beats me, past 3 films I have seen him in he hasn't played a horror role yet (Dr Wong) . In this one he is a Scientific investigator, checking out this pacific island for a wealthy industrialist who wants to put a Hotel resort on the island, but thing go wrong when plants start drowning people and eating people, the remaining group is captured by natives only to be let go after one person dies while captured. The last we see is Boris and another man who has been scared stiff walking off in the sunset. 2 1/2 stars is about all its worth.
Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
01/23/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Not Boris Karloff's finest hour, he was so much better in the Val Lewton movies, not to mention Frankenstein and The Mummy. A low budget and uninspired screenplay sink this rather ho-hum horror flick. There is an interesting lesbian character hitting on a younger girl, but it's not enough to recommend this barely average B-movie.
Rated 2/5 Stars •
Rated 2 out of 5 stars
02/06/23
Full Review
ashley h
Odd little movie, one of several in the cheapjack voodoo cycle of late fifties. Boris Karloff is on hand as a professional debunker, Murvyn Vye is Barton MacLane guy, all bluster and macho, Elisha Cook, Jr. is furtive and nervous. The jungle sets are unbelievable even by B movie standards; the plot is impossible to follow, as it moves from the semi-serious, early on, to the surreal, as story progresses; and production values are suggestive of a late entry in the Bomba series. Yet it has its charms, and I wouldn't call it unwatchable, just dumb. Everyone in the movie seems to be an inhabitant of his own special mental world, regardless of what is in fact going on in the story, and the movie is a bit of a mix and match job, with voodoo set in the Pacific, rather than the Caribbean, killer plants, sinister natives, who have a compassionate streak, and air of magnanimous confusion that can draw in the most critical viewer if he's in the right mood, and too lazy to change the channel.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
03/31/23
Full Review
Audience Member
When a professional hoax-buster (Karloff) is hired to investigate a supposedly cursed island where a hotel magnate wants to develop a resort, he and his party find their journey there disrupted by a string of strange occurances. The most unexpected horrors await on the island, however.
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[i]Clair (Jean Engstrom) learns that skinny dipping on Voodoo Island can be hazardous to your health[/i]
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"Voodoo Island" is a film populated by fascinating, well-acted characters. Karloff's devout skeptic Philip Knight; Tyler as Adams, his Girl Friday with the photographic memory and endless suite of skills; Cook Martin Schyler, the greedy plantation owner who knows more than he tells; and Reason as Matthew Gunn, the boatsman with a troubled past. Unfortunately, these fascinating, well-acted characters are in a script that spends too much time getting to the island, gives us too much romantic subplot and not enough monsters once the characters are there, and then ends when we finally get to the sort of stuff we'd be watching the movie for in the first place.
The film is at its high point when architect Clair Winters (Engstrom) decides to go skinny-dipping in a particular idyllic looking lake, and gives us the first indication that there really is a grave threat on the island (aside from the natives who have the power to lurk unseen in really thin brush cover)... and this is a pretty weak highpoint. The voodoo build-up of the first half of the movie doesn't seem to go anywhere, and the hoax-busting Philip Knight doesn't really get to bust a hoax, nor does he get his come-uppance through the supernatural. I'm not entirely sure what sort of movie the filmmakers were trying to make, but whatever it was, they failed. It's too bad that a good cast and a collection of interesting characters were wasted in such a crappy script.
(By the way, do I need to review a couple of Seduction Cinema's softcore lesbian porn movies to get something out of my system, or was Clair coming onto Adams in the scene on the porch of Schyler's house?)
Voodoo Island (aka "Silent Death")
Starring: Boris Karloff, Beverly Tyler, Rhodes Reason, Elisha Cook, and Jean Engstrom
Director: Richard H. Landau
Rated 2/5 Stars •
Rated 2 out of 5 stars
01/18/23
Full Review
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