In the arresting opening, a naked girl is killed by a slimy monster. We cut forward to a ship visiting a remote island whose passengers include a man looking for his mother and a girl, Sheila, searching for her father. A young doctor, the hero Bill, is also on board. Once on the island, they meet a doctor who is looking for his lost patient. However soon one night Sheila is disturbed by a deformed man outside. One afternoon she is attacked by the creature in the woods, a native impales it on a pole but it turns and kills him. A corpse is discovered with "chlorophyll poisoning", and meanwhile a young native girl and her lover are brutally murdered, their organs strewn over the grassy ground...
Eddie Romero's tacky but cheerful Philippines-filmed horror feature is a typical feature about a monster on the loose which makes good use of the jungle locations but ultimately fails as a film due to atrocious camera-work and a tiny budget which isn't exactly put to good use. Some flashes of inspiration occur but these are few and far between the long moments of boredom which fill out the film. Most of the time people walk around a lot (this is called padding, and it happens very often in this film). I would say that there are probably 9 minutes of boredom to every minute of action in this film, which isn't very good when you think about it, and only the ending offers any real excitement. The tacky nature of the film is certainly attractive, and brings images of a time where horror was a lot more fun and cheap and entertaining in nature than it is in these days, where the latest horror films are blockbusters and the independent features seem to be trying to outdo each other in terms of grossness and gore.
The acting in the film is all below standard, with former teenage star John Ashley (HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER) as the bland hero doctor who doesn't actually do much, and Angela Pettyjohn displaying no acting talents whatsoever (and, sure enough, she later went into the porn business, which is obviously where her real interest lay). With a cast of dull characters, you may wonder what this film does have to offer to the horror fan.
On the plus side there is some (brief) gore, with a decapitation with lots of blood and some internal organs being ripped out. There is also an unconvincing monster on the loose which is absolutely hilarious, it runs around and just sort of thumps people to death. As a marketing ploy audience members were given vials of green blood which was supposed to be used as an aphrodisiac, and I'm sure this was very popular with the teenage drive-in crowd. However some moments of the film are embarrassingly amateur and don't work at all, like the camera zooming in and out whenever the monster is around. Instead of being wacky and psychedelic, it's just distracting and stupid. The title is one of the more fetching aspects of this '60s slice of exploitation, which, while not necessarily totally bad, is just too clichéd, slapdash and silly to be a good film. It's worth a look if you're into this sort of thing though, just because it's different.
Eddie Romero's tacky but cheerful Philippines-filmed horror feature is a typical feature about a monster on the loose which makes good use of the jungle locations but ultimately fails as a film due to atrocious camera-work and a tiny budget which isn't exactly put to good use. Some flashes of inspiration occur but these are few and far between the long moments of boredom which fill out the film. Most of the time people walk around a lot (this is called padding, and it happens very often in this film). I would say that there are probably 9 minutes of boredom to every minute of action in this film, which isn't very good when you think about it, and only the ending offers any real excitement. The tacky nature of the film is certainly attractive, and brings images of a time where horror was a lot more fun and cheap and entertaining in nature than it is in these days, where the latest horror films are blockbusters and the independent features seem to be trying to outdo each other in terms of grossness and gore.
The acting in the film is all below standard, with former teenage star John Ashley (HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER) as the bland hero doctor who doesn't actually do much, and Angela Pettyjohn displaying no acting talents whatsoever (and, sure enough, she later went into the porn business, which is obviously where her real interest lay). With a cast of dull characters, you may wonder what this film does have to offer to the horror fan.
On the plus side there is some (brief) gore, with a decapitation with lots of blood and some internal organs being ripped out. There is also an unconvincing monster on the loose which is absolutely hilarious, it runs around and just sort of thumps people to death. As a marketing ploy audience members were given vials of green blood which was supposed to be used as an aphrodisiac, and I'm sure this was very popular with the teenage drive-in crowd. However some moments of the film are embarrassingly amateur and don't work at all, like the camera zooming in and out whenever the monster is around. Instead of being wacky and psychedelic, it's just distracting and stupid. The title is one of the more fetching aspects of this '60s slice of exploitation, which, while not necessarily totally bad, is just too clichéd, slapdash and silly to be a good film. It's worth a look if you're into this sort of thing though, just because it's different.