Back in the VHS boom of the 80's along came Action International Pictures. This was a company my friends and I would go out of our way to avoid. Known mostly for distributing films made by co-founder David A. Prior (like the atrocious vampire war movie Last Platoon), you could tell an A.I.P. film from the box art alone. Take a muscular hero type who has nothing to do with the movie, add some generic action scenes in the background and, viola, instant box art. It's too bad that most of their releases were total shit. Island Fury was one such release and, until seeing it as part of Dark Sky's "Drive-In Double Feature" DVD, I can't say I was heartbroken to miss it first time through.

Brought to us by executive producer Mardi Rustam (Dracula Vs. Frankenstein, Psychic Killer, Tobe Hooper's Eaten Alive) and originally titled the much more appealing, Please Don't Eat The Babies, this sat unreleased for six years after being filmed in 1983. And, after viewing the results, it's not hard to see why. This, my friends, is one outright terrible movie. It's the kind of film I have to force myself to sit through to the bitter end and, even after seeing as much garbage as I have, that's a pretty rare thing.

It's not like things start off overly bad either. Cheap looking, sure. We're introduced to best friends Bobbylee (Tanya Louise) and Sugar (Monet Elizabeth) as they spend the day in Chinatown having fun and shopping. They're also being followed by two thuggish-looking sleaze balls, which leads to a foot chase and subsequent kidnapping at the hands of Sid (Joe Lombardo).

Sid's very interested in the necklace Sugar's wearing and, while travelling by boat to the island where she received it and Sid thinks contains a treasure, we're told in flashbacks about the girls' traumatic past. Looks like, years ago when they were in their early teens, they took a boat trip with some friends and ended up at said island meeting the elderly matriarch Jebediah (Hank Worden) who's eccentric nature turns malicious as they start drugging one of the girl's tea, blow-up their boat with a shotgun in a hilariously staged moment, and start killing them off with cannibalism in mind.

Island Fury isn't only a really badly produced effort; it also doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense. It almost looks like they originally filmed the middle section and went back years later to film all the moments with Sid and the girls just so they'd actually have something they could toss onto video store shelves to attempt to make back their, I assume minimal, investment. The crime-thriller introduction constantly bumps up against the flesh eating, the deaths are sloppy, and the finale is not only predictable but outright awful.

Then again, awful is the perfect word to describe this. Sure, if you're a fan of trashy cinema you might get some enjoyment out of director Henri Charr simulating an earthquake by vigorously shaking the camera, the solitary gore moment with an open chest cavity, or the fact Jebediah's mentally challenged son runs around for quite a while with a cleaver imbedded in his face, but even that's no excuse for you to waste almost ninety-minutes of your life with this.

The acting here is uniformly amateurish with Lombardo's over-the-top portrayal of a typified Italian gangster getting competition from Worden's embarrassing, and worn-out looking, turn. It's really too bad to see him slumming here as he spent a good two decades appearing in westerns after his 1935 debut and appeared briefly in the dopey b-movies The Ice Pirates and Big Bad John. The rest of the unknown cast has no idea how to delivers lines or emotion with the best performance coming from the youngest cast member in Stanley Wells as Jebediah's grandson, Jimmer.

Without the novelty of its original title to draw in unsuspecting viewers, Island Fury is even a low-point amongst all the trash A.I.P. released during their heyday. It doesn't deserve to be paired up with the flawed, yet watchable, Barracuda on DVD and it certainly doesn't deserve an iota of your time. (Chris Hartley, 1/12/09)

Directed By: Henri Charr.
Written By: John B. Pfeifer.

Starring: Monet Elizabeth, Tanya Louise, Michael Wayne, Mike Jacobs.

Picture Ratio: Full Frame.

Picture Quality: Dark Sky couldn't of done much with this and that explains it's VHS quality picture. It's grainy, has specks galore, and even has a few shimmering moments. It simply looks like they've transfered an old videotape to DVD.

Extras: Released by Dark Sky as part of their "Drive-In Double Feature" (click for artwork) series, Island Fury is paired-up, be it inexplicably, with the 1977 "killer fish" flick Barracuda. It's set-up to play like the real thing with ads for concessions and trailers inbetween the features but you also have the option to watch each film seperately without all of that if you so wish.

Visit Dark Sky Films for more info.