U.K.'s Arrow Films is giving the master treatment to Nico Mastorakis's 1976 film Island of Death, a film reportedly made as a response to the success of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre and a film almost guaranteed to please fans of that type of intense, gory and incredibly brutal cinema.

Truthfully, I just plain didn't enjoy it. At all.

This version is a fully uncut and restored version, one can almost picture writer/director Nico Mastorakis smiling with orgasmic glee, and while there's a plot to be found in the film there's no question that it comes secondary to Mastorakis's desire to fill the film from beginning to end with as much brutality and perversity as possible.

In the film, Christopher (Robert Behling) and Celia (Jane Ryall) are a young couple (kind of/sort of - you'll understand if you make it to the end) who arrive on the Greek island of Mykonos during the off season. Christopher and Celia don't let too long pass before the weirdness sets in such as when a sexually rejected Christopher has sex with a sheep then kills it.

Or wait. How about when Christopher talks Celia into having sex with a painter then, wait for it, kills the painter?

The homosexuals are next.

The list goes on. Eventually, we learn of Christopher's plan to clear the island of its perversity. Of course, he has little insight into the perversity of his own behaviors but, then again, that merely qualifies him to be a politician in the U.S. The killings going on, increasingly creative and brutal in their manifestation, but eventually Celia will grow tired of it all.

Of course, that will also change.

There are films that at least pretend they have a reason for all the gratuitous violence, but Island of Death is for the most part devoid of any sense of purpose or meaning other than capitalizing on Tobe Hooper's vastly superior film for its inspiration. Despite the usual Arrow Films quality packaging, this time I'll have to say "Skip It!" and simply rent Hooper's film instead.

© Written by Richard Propes
The Independent Critic