Review: Mad Doctor of Blood Island (1969)

Directed by: Eddie Romero, Gerry DeLeon
Starring: John Ashley, Angelique Pettyjohn, Eddie Garcia
Written by: Reuben Canoy
Music by: Tito Arevalo
Country: Philippines
Available on: Blu-ray (Severin Films)
IMDb

Herschell Gordon Lewis is generally hailed as the “Godfather of Gore,” thanks to his 1963 splatter flick, Blood Feast. And sure, he was definitely one of the earliest enthusiasts of on-screen fleshly carnage, but he wasn’t the only one. Around the same time, Filipino producer/director Eddie Romero was working on a series of films set in a fictional location called Blood Island, populated by green-blooded monsters with a predilection for rending humans limb from limb. Mad Doctor of Blood Island, from 1969, is the second film in the trilogy (the third if you count the series’ progenitor, Terror is a Man (1959)).

As the title makes clear, the film’s about a mad scientist who resides on Blood Island. He’s been using chlorophyll to create scaly green monsters that are now rampaging around and massacring an assortment of naked women. While Lewis’ splatter flicks often had a naivete about them in that almost nothing but the frequent decapitations, dismemberments, and disembowelments was adult-oriented, Romero and his co-director Gerardo de Léon often added gratuitous nudity to the equation to make things extra spicy.

This flick has the feel of a prototypical cannibal film, where the sleaze and primitively but effectively executed gore are draped in the mossy tendrils of exotic flora and the atrocities are often overshadowed by the movie’s mesmerizing travelogue qualities. Just for the hell of it, Romero and crew also throw in some animal deaths. That said, Mad Doctor of Blood Island isn’t mean-spirited at all; in fact, it’s sort of got a lively, fun beach party vibe to it, if Frankie and Annette had been whisked to the Philippines and pursued by slaughter-drunk monstrosities with rotting, sluicing skin.

But unique ambience aside, there’s not enough butchery and salaciousness — and definitely not enough story — to keep things from dragging quite a bit in its hollow midsection. A lot of runtime is burned by dull characters standing around discussing dull things that have no bearing. The one exception is Marla, the pseudo-villain of this tale, who actually kind of kicks ass. That may not have been what was intended, but she’s the only one out there bucking expectations, so it was refreshing to see her doing her thing.

Mad Doctor of Blood Island has enough good and interesting things about it, especially considered in the context of when and where it was made, that it’s a worthwhile use of time for anyone whose tastes linger on the grotesque and lascivious. It’s a singular brew of a few different types of genre film you don’t often see smushed together under a single title, and it makes for something that’s likely to hang around in your brain for a bit.

Overall rating: 7 out of 10