SPOILERS - It's no Black Swan or Cutthroat Island or even Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, but Hurricane Island is fun if you dial your expectations down to extreme low tide. It's a combination of historical epic and fantasy, set just two decades after Columbus's discovery of the New World.
You have beefy hero Jon Hall and his crew, carting famed explorer Ponce de León (Edgar Barrier) around Cuba and pre-colonial Florida in a bed as they seek a cure for the poison arrow that hit de Leon in the opening scenes. You have lady pirate (in 1513!) Marie Windsor, in her Technicolor-red lipstick, and evil pirate Marc Lawrence scheming with a warlike native brave.
Of course, the real Ponce de León was a slaver who put down Indian rebellions brutally and died from his poison-arrow wound; but in this version, he ends up an enlightened seeker of peace, grateful for the help of native shaman Okhala (Jo Gilbert), who guides the party to the Fountain of Youth, here represented by a backlot waterfall with a gush of water spouting up in the pool below. No, Ponce doesn't get any younger, but he does shake off that paralysis (shades of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade!) Alas, another sword-and-gun fight breaks out, apparently ruining the fountain which stops spurting.
The story by David Matthews is nonsense, with dialogue like Hall (re Windsor's wig): "A blond Spaniard?" Windsor: "You have never been to our northern provinces, there are many of us there." Hall is as wooden as his galleon and Windsor overacts wildly to compensate; unbilled in the otherwise unfamiliar cast is Lyle Talbot as a doctor.
It's the kind of B-movie a studio used to be able to crank out on existing Poverty Row sets representing colonial towns and ships, achieving a cheesy epic grandeur. You have to admire producer Sam Katzman and director Lew Landers, who with ratty costumes, bathtub miniatures and a visibly rushed schedule, manage to crowd in stunts, sword fights, Windsor's murderous schemes that end with her falling for that big lunk Hall, a bevy of starlets as women convicts (!) recruited to colonize Florida, a hurricane called up on cue by Gilbert (the same tree keeps falling over in their path), and Gilbert meeting a Lost Horizon-type fate...all in 71 minutes. You won't believe a moment of it, but you will watch it all with an incredulous smile.
You have beefy hero Jon Hall and his crew, carting famed explorer Ponce de León (Edgar Barrier) around Cuba and pre-colonial Florida in a bed as they seek a cure for the poison arrow that hit de Leon in the opening scenes. You have lady pirate (in 1513!) Marie Windsor, in her Technicolor-red lipstick, and evil pirate Marc Lawrence scheming with a warlike native brave.
Of course, the real Ponce de León was a slaver who put down Indian rebellions brutally and died from his poison-arrow wound; but in this version, he ends up an enlightened seeker of peace, grateful for the help of native shaman Okhala (Jo Gilbert), who guides the party to the Fountain of Youth, here represented by a backlot waterfall with a gush of water spouting up in the pool below. No, Ponce doesn't get any younger, but he does shake off that paralysis (shades of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade!) Alas, another sword-and-gun fight breaks out, apparently ruining the fountain which stops spurting.
The story by David Matthews is nonsense, with dialogue like Hall (re Windsor's wig): "A blond Spaniard?" Windsor: "You have never been to our northern provinces, there are many of us there." Hall is as wooden as his galleon and Windsor overacts wildly to compensate; unbilled in the otherwise unfamiliar cast is Lyle Talbot as a doctor.
It's the kind of B-movie a studio used to be able to crank out on existing Poverty Row sets representing colonial towns and ships, achieving a cheesy epic grandeur. You have to admire producer Sam Katzman and director Lew Landers, who with ratty costumes, bathtub miniatures and a visibly rushed schedule, manage to crowd in stunts, sword fights, Windsor's murderous schemes that end with her falling for that big lunk Hall, a bevy of starlets as women convicts (!) recruited to colonize Florida, a hurricane called up on cue by Gilbert (the same tree keeps falling over in their path), and Gilbert meeting a Lost Horizon-type fate...all in 71 minutes. You won't believe a moment of it, but you will watch it all with an incredulous smile.
