Island Of Terror

Island Of Terror (1966)

Image From IMDB

Island of Terror is the exact type of movie i’m an absolute sucker for: Small island overran with tentacle monster turtle looking thingys that eat your bones… count me in. Peter Cushing having a whale of a time as a not so mad but on his way there scientist. Hell yeah. Secret labs, petrol bombs and boneless horses… why not. The whole movie is a riot.

Anytime a horror movie tries to cure cancer you know shits gonna go horribly wrong. It’s practically a convention at this point. The way it goes wrong this time is when the cure mutates the experimented animals into hungry bone sucking creatures and no-one can escape the small isolated island.

I loved the look of the mutant turtles (not that kind) They looked disgusting with there add shell design and look snake head. Even better was the boneless victims. The human victims looked somewhere between gross and hilarious, but the boneless horse was just amazing. B-move magic at its finest.

The three scientist in charge of working out what the hell was going on once the first boneless victim was discovered, and then working out how to defend the island against the mutated invaders were all brilliant. I loved every second on screen with Peter Cushing, Edward Judd, and Eddie Byrne. I’d watch a whole series of them solving insane problems together using the power of science and reading notes. When they finally take arms against the creatures, it’s classic. (See photo above)

The movie doesn’t do anything new, and it’s not unlike hundreds of other b-movies of its kind, but it is a lot of fun. The monster attacks are massively entertaining, especially when they fall from trees, slide over cars, or try to fuck with Peter Cushing. Everyone knows what kind of movie they’re in, and they all deliver.

It’s the sort of movie I greatly miss, but fortunately for me there are hundreds, if not thousands, of them out there from bygone decades when we used to like movies to be fun instead of preachy. I’ll never grew tired of these silly fun movies. If B-movie sci-fi creature features are your thing, give this one a go. It’s worth it for Peter Cushing alone.