Voodoo Island (1957)

Review by All Movie Guide
Reginald Le Borg's Voodoo Island is one of those movies that used to get shown on late-night local television -- ostensibly a horror movie, it didn't have quite enough scares or good visual monsters to rate a place on "Chiller Theater," but it was unsettling enough in some of its details to get attention. Phillip Knight (Boris Karloff) is a professional skeptic with a long history of exposing hoaxes involving the supernatural and the paranormal who is hired to investigate an incident on a remote Pacific island intended for a resort hotel, where three members of a surveying team disappeared and the fourth, Mitchell (Glenn Dixon), has come back in a state of catatonia. With Knight's assistant, Sara (played by Beverly Tyler), owner's agent Barney Finch (Murvyn Vye), designer Claire Winter (Jean Engstrom), neighboring islander Martin Schuyler (Elisha Cook Jr.), and boat captain Matthew Gunn (Rhodes Reason), plus Mitchell and his attending physician, they head to the island, but they can't even get their plane's equipment to work properly on the flight out -- and the failures all seem to be linked somehow to Mitchell's condition. They manage to get there, only to be dogged by voodoo symbols along the way, and once on the island, find themselves surrounded by lethal man-eating prehistoric plants, both on land and in the water. Their search is complicated by the fact that Gunn is a man on the make (white women being scarce in his part of the Pacific) as well as on the run from a past in the war that he'd rather forget. Claire Winters isn't much different; in a couple of remarkable scenes, she reveals an interest in Knight's young woman assistant that transcends friendship, and even obliquely compares passions with Gunn. Add to that Elisha Cook Jr. in a very good performance as a man overcome by greed, among other forces (and delivering a harrowing final scene), and Karloff's droll manner, and one has the makings of a good low-budget thriller. The problems are that the script is too talky -- everyone seems to stand around and talk a lot of the time here -- and the director doesn't do much with what he's got, beyond some scary close-ups of Dixon's eyes and a surprising intensity to the scenes depicting Engstrom's character's lesbianism (which were deleted from some prints). It's still fun at times, and the presence of a young, uncredited Adam West in some prominent early scenes long ago turned it into a real hoot at horror repertory showings. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide