Island Of Death
Island Of Death DVD (Nico Mastorakis, Arrow 1977)
One of the few video nasties to genuinely earn its banned status, ‘Island Of Death’ should have stuck with its alternative title of ‘Island of Perversion’ – it’s a much more honest description of the many dubious delights to be found within this jaw-dropping slice of euro-schlock. Set on the Greek island of Mykonos, the film lays out its grotty agenda with an opening scene in which a pair of British tourists decide to have sex in a phone box while calling home. Nothing there that we haven’t already seen on a Club 18-30 holiday, you might say, but then comes the revelation that the pair are actually brother and sister, and the disgusted person listening in at the other end of the phone is their mother! It seems that the couple have been travelling around Europe, shagging each other’s brains out and killing and stealing from anyone they deem to be sexually or morally corrupt (hark who’s talking). Now it’s the turn of the Greek islanders to be judged by the incestuous perverts, and director Mastorakis has a ball depicting their murderous rampage. Victims are administered with massive drug overdoses, burned with makeshift blowtorches, slashed with swords, decapitated with bulldozer blades, hung from the wings of aeroplanes, crucified, pissed on, raped, buggered, drowned in whitewash and dumped in limepits to burn alive. A flamboyant homosexual is forced to fellate a gun barrel before having his brains blown out (a gimmick that Mastorakis later repeated with his 1986 don’t-go-in-the-woods flick, ‘The Zero Boys’), and even a cute lil’ goat gets (literally) screwed over, slaughtered and dumped down a well. What’s more, the pair take photographs of their crimes so they can gloat and masturbate over the grim souvenirs back in their rented rooms. Their rampage has not gone unnoticed, though, and some kind of international law agency official arrives on the island in hot pursuit along with a journalist who is writing a feature about the strange deaths. But the dubious duo have a plan to deal with them, too… Mastorakis started out as a writer, musician and radio DJ before moving into television and finally kickstarting his film career with a sleazy thriller called ‘Death Has Blue Eyes’. By his own admission, he set out to make a deliberately provocative movie for his second effort that would be guaranteed to draw attention to itself. I think it is fair to say that he succeeded – once seen, ‘Island of Death’ is never forgotten, no matter how hard you try. It’s the sort of flick that makes you want to rinse your eyeballs in soapy water. Even if you become numb to the endless shock value, the relentless sleaze and matter-of-fact direction lend the film a strangely compelling sense of dread, and it achieves a unique air of sickness and decay which lingers long in the memory. Something else which stays with you are the terrible 70s fashions and completely inappropriate, utterly bonkers theme song, ‘Destination Understanding’ – a badly dated psychedelic ballad which features such flower-power lyrics as “Jesus said look, I’m flying!” before descending into a chorus where the singer screams ‘GET THE SWORD! KILL THEM ALL!” over and over. Mastorakis had a hand in this, too, and among the many extras on this disc is a rockabilly band’s tribute cover of the song. It seems that the threadbare production was so cheap that Mastorakis and his crew were reduced to approaching anyone who looked even remotely American in the street to ask them to appear in the film, but it benefits from being shot on genuine out-of-season Mykonos locations, something which lends the movie a curiously menacing quality. Surprisingly, the movie didn’t kill the career of everyone who was involved in it – star Bob Belling went on to enjoy roles in films such as ‘Cujo’ and Clint Eastwood’s ‘The Enforcer’ and Jessica Dublin (who receives a golden shower here before getting her head chopped off) appeared in several of the better-known Troma films such as ‘The Toxic Avenger’. Perhaps most surprisingly, Nikos Tsachiridis (whose manic laughing face framed the cover of the banned UK video release) built up a huge list of acting roles after portraying a bisexual rapist shepherd here, even including episodes of ‘The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones’. According to the director, in the early 80s, Belling sadly killed himself in a manner that could have come straight out of ‘Island Of Death’ when he jammed a propane tank nozzle down his throat. ‘Island of Death’ actually received a heavily cut cinema release in the UK under the title ‘A Craving For Lust’, but the banned video, like this DVD, was completely uncut (when he learned that his film had been declared a video nasty, Mastorakis angrily described the BBFC as “…a hypocritical regime of constipated sphincters!”). Amusingly, an enterprising company tried to sneak it past the BBFC in the mid-90s by submitting it under the ludicrous title ‘Psychic Killer II’, but the board was having none of it – this Arrow release is the first time that the 35 year old film has been legally available in uncut form in the UK, and it is still a disturbing, perverted powerhouse of a movie. Liam Ronan
