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Between Tourneur's Caribbean undead and Robert Minor's famous The Masses cartoon ("At last! The perfect soldier"), Ken Wiederhorn has plenty to work with. The opening features iridescent gradations of blue and orange, plus John Carradine as a link to Sekely's Revenge of the Zombies. The Final Girl (Brooke Adams) is introduced catatonic in a lifeboat adrift, her flashback reveals a gaggle of cranky tourists hoping for "one hell of a yarn" and getting it. The Flying Dutchman is a Nazi battleship wrecked on the reef of a tropical island, the crumbling hotel amid jungle foliage houses even more World War II holdovers. Nazi ghouls ("neither dead nor alive, but somewhere in between"), moldy troopers engineered as SS experiments, the scarred doctor lording feebly over the marshlands (Peter Cushing) has a name for them, "Toten Korps." Out of the depths they emerge to trudge toward the camera, a product as shoddy as its ideology, remove the goggles and Aryan flesh promptly melts under the sun. The mood is nightmarishly tranquil, the action moves surreally from beachfront to swamp to darkened swimming pool, claustrophobia gets to the point where even the toughest of castaways would rather confront the shuffling death squad than hide inside another pressure-cooker chamber. Quite the striking, erudite frisson, which manages to register Santayana's warning while brushing ever so slightly against Rossellini's Germany Year Zero (a blasting phonograph forgotten amid the rubble of a regime). "Sea spits out what it can't keep down." Reviewers who dismissed it as rubbish were most deserving of The Boys from Brazil the following year. With Luke Halpin, Fred Buch, Jack Davison, D.J. Sidney, and Don Stout.
--- Fernando F. Croce |