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Tuesday, January 21, 2020

Serpent Island (1954)

Starring Sonny Tufts, Mary Munday, Tom Monroe, Rosalind Hayes, Don Blackman
Directed by Tom Gries
(actor & director credits courtesy IMDB.com)

A woman in search of gold her ancestor hid in the region of Haiti hires a former naval engineer to help her find it, and they embark on a dangerous journey.

Most notable for future sci-fi filmmaker Bert I. Gordon's involvement as cinematographer and supervising editor, this is a low budget and pretty amateur effort compiling lots of stock footage around the limited cast.  Tufts, although a bit old and out of shape to play the leading man, at least gives us an anchor for the story, narrating most of it, although the cliche-filled script doesn't do him any favors.  Munday is attractive, but not particularly a good actress, and several scenes padded with the stock footage run much too long.  However, the film's most abject failure is its haphazard editing, which becomes rather comical during the climactic scenes.  Although the music is credited to Domingo Rodrigues, much of the main title and later sections are obviously taken from Elmer Bernstein's score for Cat-Women Of The Moon.

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