In a truly oddball movie, it says something when the fishmen are one of the least odd things about it.
In 1891, the survivors of a prison ship wreck, including a medical officer, Lieutenant Claude de Ross (Claudio Cassinelli), and several prisoners, wash up on the shore of an uncharted island in the Caribbean. They are discovered by the island’s self-proclaimed owner, Edmond Rackham (Richard Johnson) and a woman named Amanda (Barbara Bach.)
Claude discovers that Amanda is being held captive. Her father, Ernest (Joseph Cotton), a once-prominent biologist, is also being held on the island and he just happens to be conducting experiments involving human/fish hybrid creatures.
Screamers is a strange hodgepodge of horror, science fiction, and action/adventure with a creature feature thrown in for good measure. The script can’t seem to figure out if it wants to be one thing or another, so it attempts to be all of the above. Directed and co-written by Sergio Martino, who is known for writing and/or directing such Italian giallo films like Torso, The Suspicious Death of a Minor and Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key, the film is nothing if not ambitious.
Richard Johnson, who played Dr. Menard in Lucio Fulci’s Zombie, is exceptionally hammy as Rackham. Claudio Cassinelli makes for a rather wooden good guy. Barbara Bach’s character is supposed to be a prisoner, yet she freely wields a rifle in her introductory scene, so anything she does after that isn’t really a surprise.
The fishmen suits are quite dopey looking but they’re constructed well and look appropriately like hybrid fish men. In a truly oddball movie, it says something when the fishmen are one of the least odd things about it.
Also known as Island of the Fishmen (its original Italian title) and Something Waits in the Dark (its first U.S. title) , Screamers is a film with a history that’s much more interesting than the final product. I’m referring to it as Screamers because that is name of the version I watched. It features an American-made prologue that was written and directed by Miller Drake and features gory makeup effects by Chris Walas (The Fly). The prologue was added to make the film more violent and presumably more attractive to U.S. horror audiences in the early 80s. (The trailers promised that the movie shows people being turned inside-out. It doesn’t.)
I can’t say I disliked Screamers. It’s not a terrible movie; it just doesn’t gel as a cohesive whole. It tries to meld multiple genres and doesn’t pull it off. It’s not scary, it’s not particularly imaginative, but it never descends into “so bad it’s good” territory that would make it more memorable than it is. At best, it’s forgettable and, at worst, it’s forgettable.
2.0 out of 5.0 stars
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