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Voodoo Island/The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake
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Editorial Review of DVD
This is one potent DVD, pairing two interesting (and one of them genuinely creepy) low-budget horror movies on one dual-sided platter, each augmented by the presence of its original trailer. Each movie has also been given a generous 16 chapters, which effectively divide up the films dramatically, such as they are. Reginald Le Borg's Voodoo Island is the more talky of the two movies, and one may easily be confused by its plot (which has to do with voodoo, but also, as it works out, with man-eating plants). It's usually regarded as a bomb, but Boris Karloff keeps it interesting with his starring performance and there are some very strange instances of casting and characterization behind him, starting with Jean Engstrom as a very obviously lesbian designer along on voyage, Glenn Dixon as the stricken Mitchell, John Huston veteran Friedrich Ledebur as a tribal chief, and a young (uncredited) Adam West, no less, as a radio operator.
Edward L. Cahn's The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake would make an excellent and really creepy 90-minute episode of The X Files or Kolchak: The Night Stalker if someone ever wanted to adapt the script, without too many changes needed, although it's also damned creepy as is, in its own right. Anyone would be hard put to outdo the sheer strangeness of Paul Wexler as the Jivaro Indian with a penchant for taking people's heads, and Henry Daniell's character is one of the great low-rent monsters in American cinema. The whole disc is an ideal Halloween purchase, and it even has the virtue of simple, easy-to-use menus on both sides of the platter. The audio is mastered a bit low in volume, but that's fixed easily enough, and the images of both movies are crystalline in their detail and richness. Indeed, one doubts that Voodoo Island, which never made it to laserdisc, has ever looked this good before, and The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake puts its LD edition to shame. Both movies are shown full-screen (1.33:1), in keeping with the way they were shot and conceived. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
Edward L. Cahn's The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake would make an excellent and really creepy 90-minute episode of The X Files or Kolchak: The Night Stalker if someone ever wanted to adapt the script, without too many changes needed, although it's also damned creepy as is, in its own right. Anyone would be hard put to outdo the sheer strangeness of Paul Wexler as the Jivaro Indian with a penchant for taking people's heads, and Henry Daniell's character is one of the great low-rent monsters in American cinema. The whole disc is an ideal Halloween purchase, and it even has the virtue of simple, easy-to-use menus on both sides of the platter. The audio is mastered a bit low in volume, but that's fixed easily enough, and the images of both movies are crystalline in their detail and richness. Indeed, one doubts that Voodoo Island, which never made it to laserdisc, has ever looked this good before, and The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake puts its LD edition to shame. Both movies are shown full-screen (1.33:1), in keeping with the way they were shot and conceived. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide