Mystery on Monster Island (1981)

Too much of everything

Nice effects though.

best movie i've ever seen.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

I rented this from the online DVD rental service I regularly use, and the back of the DVD sleeve said that the movie lasted only 84 minutes. When I started watching the movie, it didn't take long for me to feel in pain. I kept telling myself, "It's only 84 minutes long." But the DVD sleeve was wrong - the movie lasted an additional 20 minutes or so. So you can imagine how I felt by the end of the movie.The movie goes wrong in almost every way you can think of. There is the script, for example. It's pretty dumb throughout, but near the end of the movie there is a ludicrous twist that makes less and less sense the more you think about what happened before that twist happened. Even more unbearable was the character of the professor. He is so whiny, so blubbering, that I wanted to ram my fist into my TV screen every time the movie focused on him.As for the special effects... they are pretty low tech when compared to effects from Hollywood movies, even with Hollywood movies made as the same time as this movie. However, when you consider this movie had a pretty low budget, they aren't THAT bad - I got the sense they effects artists were trying pretty hard with what they got.

And todays new word is "D R O S S."dross |drôs; dräs| noun something regarded as worthless; rubbish : there are bargains if you have the patience to sift through the dross. • foreign matter, dregs, or mineral waste, in particular scum formed on the surface of molten metal.There is no mystery on mystery island. The 'monsters" are as scary as inflatables seen in a cheesy parade. Acting is subpar and the script, below what you'd run across in student projects.Go away. Save the 90 minutes for something worthwhile.........like a root canal.

Unfortunately, this one constituted another gaffe within my ongoing Halloween challenge since it's not really a horror film despite title, director (he'd later make the gory PIECES [1983]) and presence of genre icons Peter Cushing and Paul Naschy! In fact, it's a typical Jules Verne adventure (based on his much-filmed "Mysterious Island") which proves surprisingly palatable – thanks also to a lively score – though unbalanced by comedy relief from the youthful hero's bumbling/cowardly sidekick, a Professor of Elocution whose name is constantly mispronounced ("T. Artelet not tartlet!").Cushing is the protagonist's rich uncle who has purchased an island, to which the boy is sent and where he meets a variety of dangers (pirates, cannibals, monsters) – eventually, there's a twist with respect to most of these, which thankfully explains the sheer poverty of the creatures on display! On the other hand, Naschy has a very small role at the start as a man who has struck gold – which is then coveted by his associates. The latter include Terence Stamp who, for obvious reasons, was Cushing's chief rival for the acquisition of the island; later on, he turns up on it (ludicrously shrouded from top to bottom complete with anachronistic goggles!) with his bandit horde to take the gold by force – to this end, he even plants a female 'shipwreck victim' to lure the hero into divulging the loot's whereabouts.Coupled with the far better GORILLA AT LARGE (1954; see above) on Fox's-by-way-of-MGM "Midnite Movies" banner, it offers the film both in English and Spanish. At first, always the stickler for a film's native country being its original language, I started watching the film in Spanish but when a narrator began translating the credits into Spanish and the English subtitles proved to be of the descriptive "hard of hearing" variety, I soon gave up my puritan pretensions and watched it with the more 'user friendly' English soundtrack on. At least, one does get to hear Cushing and Stamp reciting their own lines this way...

I remember seeing this film on the Sci-Fi channel. I noticed that it had Peter Cushing in it, and I thought "Ah, a Peter Cushing movie I haven't seen. I'll tape it". What a mistake!Firstly, poor old Peter is hardly in it at all. Secondly, Terence Stamp is also billed, but also barely gets a look in. Thirdly, it's so cheap and tacky that even if they were in it for longer, it would still be unendurable. The monsters on Monster Island look like something that got rejected from an episode of Doctor Who for being too unconvincing. The plot is just a modest variation of The Lost World, but rather than a plateau in the middle of the Amazon, the action occurs on an island in the middle of uncharted waters.The director Simon has made some bad movies (Pieces springs to mind), but this is still a good bet for one of his worst. It may entertain very young kids, but for anyone over the age of 8 it just looks too fake. For any over the age of 18, it simply hasn't got an interesting enough storyline.Sorry Cushing fans, this one's not worth the effort.