DVD Fiend of Dope Island/Pagan Island

The main features are artistically unambitious but entertaining. FIEND is a fast-moving melodrama about the spectacular self-destruction of a small Caribbean island's whip-cracking tyrant, played by Bruce Bennett. Tania Velia, aka "the Yugoslavian bombshell," is imported to dance for The Fiend, but she's repelled by him and hooks up with an undercover narcotics agent, played by Robert Bray. Velia is gorgeous, and the director of FIEND made the most of her assets. Bennett gives a very vigorous performance, coming off like a psychotic who's been knocked on the head many, many times. The script is lousy, though, and the film suffers from a weak storyline. Arguably the sensationalism of all the brawls and whippings, and the presence of Tania Velia, make up for the film's most serious flaws. It's basically a fun but dumb movie.

PAGAN ISLAND, directed by Barry Mahon, is a 58-minute endurance test. A bevy of beautiful girls wear garlands of flowers and grass skirts. Into their feminine island paradise stumbles a shipwrecked sailor, who becomes infatuated with one of the locals. There's some ceremonial dancing and an underwater battle with a giant clam, and a very bizarre closing scene suggesting that the hero has succumbed to, or been tempted by, necrophilia.

The acting is generally terrible. The island girls speak "pidgin English," supposedly learned from a previous visitor. Their grammar is terrible, but they never fail to make sense, and their vocabularies are incredibly huge. Basically they talk like normal adult Americans who've chosen to eliminate unnecessary articles and tenses from their speech. It's impossible to take these "island girls" seriously. But they are fun to see and hear. The Queen of the island speaks every line as if she's reading from a cue card, and her lack of enthusiasm is incredible. She seems almost suicidal. The "plot" of PAGAN ISLAND involves a proposed marriage between the shipwrecked guy and his chosen girl, whose religion makes the marriage problematic.

More valuable are the "Goona Goona" short features, most dating from the 1930s. They look like tame National Geographic documentaries today, but 60 years ago the topless female was a rare cinematic commodity, and these films of Balinese women going about their chores au natural were marketed with less innocent "exploitation" films. There's also a really dirty short with simulated sex in a bamboo hut and narration loaded with double-entendre jokes.

Overall this is an entertaining and very unusual collection of films from Something Weird. If you buy it, or already own it, look for the "Easter egg," a trailer for Zorita the stripper's exciting film "I Married A Savage"! It's sobering to learn that Zorita was a native of Youngstown, Ohio.

The script was exceptionally good (in that it was bad and full of one-liners) and the acting was over-done with competence.

Easily one of the best b-movies in the collection. Keeps your attention and doesn't drag.