Slaughter Island — dvd movie review

If you’re looking for cheese, Slaughter Island is something of the canned, sprayable persuasion. Coming across as something between a student film and a Full Moon picture, Slaughter Island sees a group of teens venturing off to an island for fun, sun, and death at the hands of a supernatural entity. It’s a pure body-count film, lacking even a central protagonist. Just know that there are five girls in bikinis and five guys in swim shorts, and each one will serve as fodder for the beast.

Slaughter Island isn’t really anything approaching quality, but still musters a surprising degree of entertainment in its low budget – make that dirt-cheap — death scenes, many of which induce an involuntary double take of initial laughter and subsequent winces of pain. Particularly convincing are the opening sequence, featuring a female experiencing a spike through a sandal, and a latter scene where a young man gets a tree branch through the mouth. Mega ouch! Additional shockers come in the form of an morbidly anorexic female, whose torso is only slightly thicker than her arms, and another female with the body of a model, and the face of man. *Shudder*. But again, if you’re looking to this movie for eye-candy, you’re probably not getting out enough.

In all honesty, I probably make Slaughter Island sound worse than it is. The film’s entertaining in a low-budget cult sort of way, and I never felt bored watching it. Furthermore, the film has some good examples of how you can create some very effective effects out of a very limited toolset – something aspiring horror filmmakers may appreciate. I can’t really see myself watching Slaughter Island again, but for what it was, it served its purpose.

The DVD

Cinema Epoch presents Slaughter Island in a 1.85:1 letterboxed format, with Japese audio and English subtitles. The video is decently crisp, and differs in quality depending on the cameras used for the shoot (there seem to be 3 – 4 consumer grade cameras, of varying technical specs). The subtitles are decent, and fully convey the action going on, never once descending into the realm of Yoda-Speak (a small problem I noticed on Cinema Epoch’s Zero Woman R disc [review forthcoming]).

Extras come in the form of a trailer for the film, a behind the scenes, fly-on-the-wall type documentary, a still gallery, and a collection of Cinema Epoch trailers. The documentary doesn’t really go into anything about the inspiration for the story, or the methods of pulling off the effects, so it comes across as a bit of filler. Still, the trailer gallery got me interested in a few of the upcoming Cinema Epoch releases.

All in all, a decent disc for a fairly weak film.

About the Author

Chris Nelson has been a film fanatic since well before he can remember. A former film and English major, he is now a Software Engineer and contract Technical Writer living in the Silicon Valley.