Voodoo Island
This film starts with a big visual joke about its budget-limited genre, and you think ‘This might actually be good.’ Don’t be fooled. Unless you’re a Karloff, Adam West or director Reginald Le Borg completist, my recommendation is to switch off and find something better. You shouldn’t have even started.
The harshness with which I begin reflects the fact that the film for a long time is eminently watchable, but ends a miserable disappointment that makes you question your judgment. Anyone approaching the films from Bel-Air Productions with high expectations is on a Fool’s Errand. For a B-picture, VOODOO ISLAND starts strong, with a simple setting of the story in a meeting between four men. The characters are quite quickly delineated by Richard Landau’s script. It pits the rationalist Philp Knight (Boris Karloff) against the inability of Dr Wilding (Herbert Patterson) to diagnose the condition of Mitchell (Glenn Dixon). Mitchell suffers from a kind of catatonia, staring without blinking, unable to move fluidly and occasionally experiencing a twitch in his right eye. (As a non-medical non-professional, I was perplexed by how his eyes would be kept moist in his state without constant assistance from a nurse.) Dixon might be giving the finest performance in the film, even though he has only one task throughout. Mitchell has been part of a party sent to survey an island on which an hotel tycoon is considering building a new resort. Knight poo-poos any rumours of supernatural causes to Mitchell’s state.
Thereby equipped with the background we are then sent on a journey, as Knight seeks to debunk all the fears expressed about the place. Along the way we meet the radio station operator at Weather Station Four (Adam West’s film debut), when the plane is forced to set down in mysterious circumstances. At this point, on learns that the likely Caribbean setting of a film with the title VOODOO ISLAND is wrong. The island is in the Pacific, and seemingly quite remote. (Wake Island is mentioned.) This is just the start of a series of disappointments, that destroy all the other good work in the script. (One thing, very difficult for all but the best writers, is the way Landau manages to make each of the characters sound different.)
Nothing in the film is developed to its fullest potential. The anthropologist Miss Winter (Jean Engstrom) is suggested to have a crush on Miss Adams (Beverly Tyler), Knight’s research assistant. Matthew Gunn (Rhodes Reason), the skipper of a boat, is implied to have some dark wartime past that has driven him to drink, but nothing comes of this beyond taking the pledge. Martin Schuyler (Elisha Cook Jr) is a curious character who put me in mind of Cornelius in Lord Jim, but his backstory is never really filled in. Least amongst these flaws is the special effects of the flesh-eating plants. They are actually decent for this era and budget – which is to say, still silly, but would impress an eight-year-old.
As with the characters, the film sets out with a great deal of ambition and then just stops. It’s rather as if someone said, with a day or two of filming left, ‘Well, we’d better wrap it up, people: we’re almost at the end of our budget. We’ll sort it out in editing.’ And that was that.
© 2026 Paul Brewer
The harshness with which I begin reflects the fact that the film for a long time is eminently watchable, but ends a miserable disappointment that makes you question your judgment. Anyone approaching the films from Bel-Air Productions with high expectations is on a Fool’s Errand. For a B-picture, VOODOO ISLAND starts strong, with a simple setting of the story in a meeting between four men. The characters are quite quickly delineated by Richard Landau’s script. It pits the rationalist Philp Knight (Boris Karloff) against the inability of Dr Wilding (Herbert Patterson) to diagnose the condition of Mitchell (Glenn Dixon). Mitchell suffers from a kind of catatonia, staring without blinking, unable to move fluidly and occasionally experiencing a twitch in his right eye. (As a non-medical non-professional, I was perplexed by how his eyes would be kept moist in his state without constant assistance from a nurse.) Dixon might be giving the finest performance in the film, even though he has only one task throughout. Mitchell has been part of a party sent to survey an island on which an hotel tycoon is considering building a new resort. Knight poo-poos any rumours of supernatural causes to Mitchell’s state.
Thereby equipped with the background we are then sent on a journey, as Knight seeks to debunk all the fears expressed about the place. Along the way we meet the radio station operator at Weather Station Four (Adam West’s film debut), when the plane is forced to set down in mysterious circumstances. At this point, on learns that the likely Caribbean setting of a film with the title VOODOO ISLAND is wrong. The island is in the Pacific, and seemingly quite remote. (Wake Island is mentioned.) This is just the start of a series of disappointments, that destroy all the other good work in the script. (One thing, very difficult for all but the best writers, is the way Landau manages to make each of the characters sound different.)
Nothing in the film is developed to its fullest potential. The anthropologist Miss Winter (Jean Engstrom) is suggested to have a crush on Miss Adams (Beverly Tyler), Knight’s research assistant. Matthew Gunn (Rhodes Reason), the skipper of a boat, is implied to have some dark wartime past that has driven him to drink, but nothing comes of this beyond taking the pledge. Martin Schuyler (Elisha Cook Jr) is a curious character who put me in mind of Cornelius in Lord Jim, but his backstory is never really filled in. Least amongst these flaws is the special effects of the flesh-eating plants. They are actually decent for this era and budget – which is to say, still silly, but would impress an eight-year-old.
As with the characters, the film sets out with a great deal of ambition and then just stops. It’s rather as if someone said, with a day or two of filming left, ‘Well, we’d better wrap it up, people: we’re almost at the end of our budget. We’ll sort it out in editing.’ And that was that.
© 2026 Paul Brewer
Mini Review: Perhaps I am being too generous with that score, but the film does have some good qualities.But it's fundamentally crippled by being incomplete, like they ran out of money so bodged a quick ending to send the audience on its way.