BA_Harrison I first read about Sergio Martino's Island of the Fishmen in Chas Balun's '80s book Horror Holocaust, where it went by the alternative title of Screamers. Since Balun's book was all about the splatter, I immediately added the film to my mental list of must see gore movies, but have only recently been able to track down a copy of the film (via YouTube). Unfortunately, what I had forgotten was that Screamers, released by Roger Corman's New World company, was a re-edited version of Martino's movie, with extra footage added to make it more marketable to the US market, and that the original version, which I had found, was virtually blood-free!The untampered Island of The Fishmen is a formulaic Jules Verne-style adventure in which a small group of castaways are washed up on an uncharted island where the owner Edmond Rackham (Richard Johnson) has creating half-man/half-fish mutants in an effort to retrieve a valuable lost treasure from the submerged ruins of Atlantis. There is lots of dreary talking and plenty of unremarkable action, but graphic violence is limited to a man having his face clawed and another falling into a trap full of spikes, making it far from the gloriously gory epic I had long hoped it would be. The film doesn't even make the most of the presence of Bond beauty Barbara Bach, who remains fully clothed throughout (unless you count her strip down to Victorian underwear, which practically covers her entire body anyway!).Shot in the same tropical locations as Lucio Fulci's Zombie, and with atmospheric cinematography from Giancarlo Ferrando, Martino's film has the look and feel of many a classic Italian gorefest, but remains a remarkably dry affair, and while the fishmen themselves are entertaining thanks to their ridiculous design and expressionless faces, the film as a whole is a rather tedious affair. I guess I'll just have to satisfy my yearning for excessively gory fish-man horror with repeat viewings of Corman's Humanoids Of The Deep (1980)—at least until I can get my hands on a copy of 'Screamers'.

Kaya Ozkaracalar This is a very enjoyable lost island adventure movie. A group of men are shipwrecked on an island ruled by a white "master" accompanied by an attractive white woman (Barbara Bach), inhabited by voodoo-practicing natives as well as some CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON type "fish men". The plot is silly (as in most movies of this type), the acting and the lines are cheesy in most cases, but it is a v-e-r-y polished-looking effort. The scene of Barbara Bach secretly leaving her manor at dawn (or dusk), crossing a shallow lake, and feeding the fish men a potion on the seashore is especially very poetic looking. The undersea footage of the ruins of Atlantis is also very impressive. One minor defect: the voodoo subplot seems to go nowhere. Surely, there are elements of THE ISLAND OF DR MOREAU in the plot, but I think the idea to make this movie was kicked off by previous year's WARLORDS OF ATLANTIS from Britain. By the way, I think the "man whose inside turned outside" tag-line in the movie's US publicity refers to the scene of a man in the lab tank who is slowly being mutated towards a fish man.

udar55 Lt. Claude (Claudio Cassinelli) and several prisoners from his sunken ship wash ashore on an island owned by Edmond Rackham (Richard Johnson). Following a few random prisoner deaths, Rackham takes in Claude and his two remaining prisoners. Luckily for everyone, Barbara Bach just happens to be on the island too! Unluckily, there are some crazy fishmen who like to kill people.This Italian produced exploiter seems to have it all - a touch of CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON mixed with DR. MOREAU with a dash of WHITE ZOMBIE voodoo and Atlantis stuff. Despite some wonky looking fishmen costumes, the film does benefit from some beautiful location photography and a nice twist about halfway through. All of the actors are good and Joseph Cotton even pops up as a old biologist. Director Sergio Martino handles himself well enough as there is action ever 10 minutes or so. That can't be said for his belated follow-up THE FISHMEN AND THEIR QUEEN (1995), easily one of the wackiest and most off-base sequels since HIGHLANDER II.

Steve Nyland (Squonkamatic) I finally got a chance to settle in and compare the two versions of this film currently going around -- First, the good old scummy, sleazy Embassy VHS print called SCREAMERS, and then a new fully restored Italian DVD by everyone's new favorite media company, No Shame of Italy.The American adverts about "men turned inside out" is as everyone says, totally misleading, and indicative of a Roger Cormanized take on what otherwise would be a superior fantasy-adventure thriller for grown ups. The complete Italian version is a somewhat sprawling, well designed and deliberately paced take on "Island of Dr. Moreau", and there's nothing wrong with that. It's a sumptuous, handsome Euro Horror outing with a brain, good plotting, character development, location shooting, period costuming and sets, etc.But I must admit that the 14 year old knucklehead weed puffer still lurking somewhere inside of me got a bigger kick out of the more lurid, sleazy and unkempt Roger Corman version, which has some nice over the top gore, a flashy but preposterous opening segment, and then the bulk of Martino's original film, albeit somewhat abridged to make room for Roger's idea of entertainment. The pacing was somewhat quicker, the shock sequences closer together, and you see just as much of Ms. Bach's fantastic form as you do in the extended Italian version.I still don't have much of an idea about what the specific story concerns though: there are a number of plot twists and incidental characters that were somewhat hard to keep track of. A local voodoo subplot didn't help much, and it's funny how everything culminates in just another fistfight between the noble castaway prisoner and the mad scientist ... Perhaps a few more viewings are in order. I will say this: Fans of the movie should avail themselves of one of these PAL imports and take a look at what is actually a movie rather than just another murky old home video -- the widescreen shot compositions once again reveal that Martino had an eye for filling his screen with interesting stuff. Nobody gets their heads ripped off like in the SCREAMERS print, but it's still interesting stuff, and once again proof that while his standards may have been pretty much confined to the area around the gutter, Roger Corman new good trashy fun when he had it made for him, and side by side these are actually better movies than they had to be.7/10