Review: Screamers (1981)
(aka The Island of the Fishmen, Something Waits in the Dark)
Directed by: Sergio Martino
Starring: Barbara Bach, Claudio Cassinelli, Richard Johnson
Written by: Sergio Martino, Sergio Donati, Cesare Frugoni
Music by: Luciano Michelini
Country: Italy
Available on: DVD (MYA Communication)
IMDb
Sergio Martino’s flick about a mad scientist creating half-fish, half-human beings — which nearly everyone knows better as Screamers, with a veiny flayed man on the VHS box with the blurb “Be warned: You will actually see a man turned inside-out” — has a fun backstory. It was originally released in 1979 under the title, The Island of the Fishmen, but once acquired for distribution by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, marketing head and schlock director Jim Wynorski re-titled it and added that ominous warning, and an additional 15 minutes or so were filmed (while excising a large chunk of existing material). The new footage includes a mostly unrelated prologue that contains nearly all this flick’s gore, but does not include a man being turned inside out, leading to one of the most egregiously misleading marketing campaigns in horror.
The new opening, however, is pretty atmospheric and definitely amps the death count significantly (featuring some pretty nice work from artist Chris Walas), so I don’t mind the re-brand all that much. But that aside, Martino’s film is an enjoyable mash-up of The Island of Doctor Moreau and Creature from the Black Lagoon that’s probably more of an adventure film than anything horrific once you get beyond those first 12 minutes. It’s easy to discern that this was made during the Italian cannibal cycle, because many of the telltale flourishes of those films crop up here — though there’s way more focus on a white man trapped in beautiful, distant isolation with a foreign people than on-screen animal slaughter, thankfully.
The story here is incredibly convoluted: A rich asshole has made a scientist and his daughter his pseudo-willing captives. The scientist has discovered a way to convert men to amphibious things in cheap costumes that can live underwater and ease the resource burden on land. The rich asshole wants a race of sea-dweller creatures to help him fetch treasure from the sunken city of Atlantis, which exists off the coast of the island they’re inhabiting. There’s a volcano that may have sunk Atlantis and may have helped speed along the fish-man evolution. There is a tribe of Haitian voodoo practitioners under the rich asshole’s employ for some reason. None of this is explained especially well — and it all comes out through awkwardly inserted monologues.
This cioppino of superfluous melodrama, gorgeous island traipsing, bargain bin costuming, and cartoonish villainy is a good bit tamer than it’s advertised, but it’s no less engaging. Charter your preconceptions more toward Jules Verne than Roger Corman, filtered through the usual weird charm of Italian genre filmmakers, and you’ll find this to be perfectly satisfying, if somewhat fleeting.
Overall rating: 6.5 out of 10
