Product Details

• Actors: Barbara Bach, Richard Johnson, Joseph Cotten, Cameron Mitchell, Mel Ferrer
• Directors: Dan T. Miller
• Format: Color, NTSC
• Language: English
• Rated: R (Restricted)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Embassy Home Entertainment
• Run Time: 83 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B0009LNAOS
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #222,926 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

After their prison ship sinks in the Caribbean, a group of prisoners and a doctor wash ashore on a seemingly deserted island. They soon discover a strange couple, who invite them to stay at their house. While the prisoners try to plan an escape, the doctor does some investigating, and soon finds out just what the pair are really doing, and why the prisoners keep disappearing mysteriously. Summary written by Jean-Marc Rocher

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Stylish, but little else., March 16, 2011

By 

Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Screamers (aka Something Waits in the Dark) (VHS Tape)

Screamers (Sergio Martino, 1979)

I first stumbled across Screamers, Roger Corman's butchery of Sergio Martino's flick Island of the Fishmen, back in the early eighties at my local video store. Given the infamous tagline and cover art ('they're humans turned inside-out!'), I knew I'd have to rent it sooner rather than later. I already had the max sitting in my hands, though, so I resolved to grab it next time I went to the store. Well, I went back a couple of days later to return everything, and it was gone. Never, as it turned out, to return. Over the years, it became less of an obsession, though the tagline always stuck in the back of my head. Back in 1982, I had only the barest idea of who Roger Corman was (and had never made the connection with Corman's own fish-men movie, Humanoids from the Deep, released the year afterwards), and no idea who Sergio Martino was. At that point, for me, "Italian" was synonymous with Lucio Fulci and Federico Fellini. (I hadn't even discovered Tornatore yet. Truly, I was a deprived child.) Well, when I finally happened upon a copy in early 2011--almost thirty years later--I knew a whole lot more about Roger Corman, a tad more about Martino (whom I've never held in the regard many other giallo fans do), and more than I could ever want to about both versions of Humanoids from the Deep. And yet I sat down to watch this, expecting it to be just as bad as the rest of the creature features from the late seventies/early eighties that Corman had messed with. And terrible it is, though it's worlds better than Humanoids from the Deep. (Either version.)

It's quite interesting, given that the pedigree of Screamers is so readily apparent that it appears in almost every review, that the unofficial IMDB "based on" credit goes to H. P. Lovecraft ("The Shadow Over Innsmouth", also one of the bases for Brian Yuzna's Dagon more than a decade later). While there are a few ghosts of "Innsmouth" to be found here, as everyone else will tell you as well, the real bones for this story come from The Island of Dr. Moreau; the only change is that the crazy doctor, Ernest Marvin (one of the final screen roles for the late, great Joseph Cotten), has been experimenting on fish instead of monkeys. But I'm getting ahead of myself. It all starts when a prison boat is shipwrecked. The ship's doctor/lieutenant, Claude de Ross (Alligator's Claudio Cassinelli), and two of his convict charges wash up on the beach of a secluded island (unmapped, of course, as every island in every Italian horror film made in the seventies and early eighties is), where they are greeted by Amanda (Caveman beauty Barbara Bach). She tries to warn them away from the island. When that doesn't work, they run into Edmond Rackham (Zombi 2's Richard Johnson), who also informs them, in a slightly more civilized manner, that they really have no choice but to leave. One of the convicts (I can't remember which, and honestly it doesn't much matter), who's become quite accustomed to freedom in a few short days, grabs a horse and takes off for even more secluded pastures, presumably the other side of the island. Instead, he turns up dead, and de Ross starts getting the idea that something strange is afoot. You'd think he'd have figured that out when everyone he met on the island told him he needed to leave, and pronto...

I left out of the synopsis that Corman's American version (it's this cut which actually has the title Screamers) has an eleven-minute introductory piece that has not a blessed thing to do with the rest of the movie, and was tacked on so Corman could put Mel Ferrer's name in the credits as an American theatrical draw (Barbara Bach, two years after Bond Girl-dom, was already not enough of a draw, it seems; she abandoned her movie career in the mid-eighties). You can safely ignore it. The rest of the movie is your basic silly Italian monster feature, with even less coherence thanks to Corman's editing job than one finds in such Italian monster-movie classics as Dr. Butcher, M.D. or Burial Ground. It's actually kind of stylish, and the whole expressionist thing that Argento was doing and kind of bled over into the rest of Italian horror cinema for a few years is in full effect here (mostly in the color work), but the amount of gore is overstated in most commentary about the film I've read (this seems to be a common theme with Martino movies; perhaps Martino's viewers aren't used to Fulci or Lenzi's contemporaneous films?), the dubbing is execrable when it's not hysterical, and as I already said, the plot is barely coherent, when it hasn't been clubbed to death by Corman. May be worth hunting down a copy of the original cut, but I wasn't moved to add it to the list. **

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Sergio Martino's classic gets a US makeover!, June 13, 2008

By 

P. Rockall "The Devil's apprentice" (Hades Inferno) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Screamers (aka Something Waits in the Dark) (VHS Tape)

This is Sergio Martino's classic sci-fi thriller Island Of The Fishmen cut down for an American audience and with new gore scenes added by Joe Dante (using the alias Dan T. Miller). Worth a laugh but you'd be better off tracking down Martino's original (longer and non gory) version.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars The only "Screamers" here is the audience, April 1, 2007

By 

John D. Page "movie fan" (usa) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Screamers (aka Something Waits in the Dark) (VHS Tape)

Bottom of the barrel gore movie that wastes your time with poor effects,lighting and acting. Scream at the people who made this mess instead