Directors: Michael Carreras, Leslie Norman (uncredited)
Writers: Michael Carreras, Dennis Wheatley
Stars: Eric Porter, Hildegard Knef, Suzanna Leigh
Run Time: 1 Hour, 37 Minutes
Link: https://amzn.to/35t4wif
Synopsis
A funky James-Bond-style music theme plays as the credits roll and we see scenes of rocky, isolated beaches and distant misty mountains. We open on a funeral on a ship; burial at sea. The captain wonders “How did we all get here,” which triggers a flashback.
The harbormaster commands them to heave-to- for inspection, but Captain Lansen orders “full stem ahead.” He’s not going to stop. It’s a cargo ship, but there are passengers, waiters, and entertainment. They’re all on the route to Caracas for various reasons.
The captain orders them to plot a course for Caracas, and to avoid the usual shipping lanes. The first mate comments that the charts they are using are really old. The cargo hold is full of barrels of stuff that the captain demands not get wet at any cost. A telegram comes in, saying a hurricane is one the way, but the captain rips it up. This captain seems to be going out of his way to do everything wrong. The captain actually asks the passengers what they want, and every last one of them want to continue– or at least none of them can go back. The first officer thinks they’re all “bloody mad.”
The tall man with the mustache searches the room of the woman traveling alone. She has stolen 2 million pounds from his employer. The father and daughter pair fight about his bad choices. There’s some kind of accident with the anchor, and the cargo bay full of must-be-kept-dry-at-any-cost explosives starts to flood.
The crew wants Mr. Hemmings, the First Officer, to assume command and return to port. It quickly devolves into a full mutiny, and the men start abandoning ship. Only the passengers are left, so the captain enlists them to do what must be done to save the ship. They take all the explosive out of the leaky hold just as the hurricane hits. As soon as that’s all done, they abandon ship as well.
The next morning, they all wake up in the lifeboat. They all fight, and the father gets eaten by a shark while one of the crewman gets shot with a signal flare gun. Before long, they hit a huge patch of floating seaweed that reaches up and grabs them. The cook is delirious and falls into the stuff, never to be seen again.
They run into a derelict ship, and it turns out to be their own ship; they’ve rowed in a big circle. The melodrama resumes as they all put on dry clothes. The engines cut out as the propellors get caught up in the huge weeds. Still, they are moving, the weeds are dragging them somewhere.
Unity and Ricaldi are making out up on the deck when a giant, one-eyed, tentacle creature grabs them. It pulls Ricaldi overboard. When the sun comes up, they find themselves in a region filled with abandoned and half-ruined ships. They see land off in the distance.
That evening, a woman literally walks out to the ship on inflatable shoes and balloons. She’s being followed by a gang of men, some of whom are dressed as conquistadors. The men on the ship do manage to run them off.
Meanwhile, we see that there’s another ship, the Santa Anita, and this one appears to be full of Spanish Inquisitors, conquistadores, and other scary-looking guys. The leader is a teenager called El Supremo, who throws a man into a pit filled with the seaweed monster. These are descendants of Spanish people who have been stuck there for centuries. There’s a second group of peaceful settlers on the island as well, and the girl from the group is named Sarah. She leaves one night, and several of the men follow her to the island.
One of the men is killed by a giant crab monster, who then fights a giant scorpion. The men are then captured by the inquisitor, who takes them to the Santa Anita. The captain and his men come to rescue them, and both El Supremo and the Inquisitor are killed. There’s a big gun battle, and we see buckets of the explosive powder surrounding the ship… and then there’s no enemy ship. “Even the weeds are burning!”
And that takes us out of the flashback to the funeral at sea. They bury El Supremo, who was stabbed in the back by the Inquisitor. A mix of the crewmen, conquistadors, priests, and whatever survivors are left sail away now that they know how to burn the weeds.
Commentary
The fog machine is working overtime in this one, but beyond the murkiness, it looks really good. The usual attention to detail from Hammer is here, but the sets are very different from the usual Hammer Horror period set-pieces… At least until we get to El Supremo’s ship, where everything goes all gothic again.
Hammer was going for an epic adventure here, with ships and pirates, but they just couldn’t get away from what made them great. They had to add in the monsters. The equipment used for walking on the seaweeds was pretty inventive, and almost steampunk design. My assumption here is that they saw the popularity of “Mysterious Island” a few years before this and tried to do their own riff of that. The giant crab monster is both silly and truly horrifying in appearance.
Some of the personal melodrama drags in its cliche-ness, but overall, it moves pretty quickly and doesn’t get boring.