But I think I have one opinion here which I could almost class to be Universal.
And that opinion is as follows. Artificially inflating a roll of one of your key actors just to drawn a crowd of people who wouldn't regularly watch a movie is an incredibly petty thing to do.
The poster and the opening credits gladly proclaim that they have Peter Cushing. Which to their credit is true.
But they set him up as if he's the main character as if he's the focal point of the entire movie. When the reality all together he might have about 5 to 6 minutes of screen time and the performance he gives during that time is very mundane and basic.
You had a chance to make something of your movie even if you only had a small amount of time with Peter Cushing.
But you squandered it.
Instead what we end up getting is this sub-par post world war 2 zombie flick. That completely runs out of steam a half hour in.
And to make everything worse I think they had a good setup. They had an opportunity to tell a halfway decent story.
They could have had an entire opening monologue involving the Nazi secret scientists and the super soldiers running around. How much money would it have cost to get a couple of Russian trench coats and some big cats? Or even just have them on the boat crashing into water to illustrate the point that there's something here.
Now let's say you don't want to go that angle. Maybe you want to make a character drama involving the main characters on your rustic little boat, trying to get from one place to the other and getting stranded on an island that happens to contain mutated Nazi men.
Why not develop these characters.
Not only does it give the audience a reason to care about these people when they inevitably die at the hands of a Nazi but it's a great way to eat up time to if you don't know how to Pad out your story.
We just need a couple of scenes of two people are having dialogue of each other as they sit down to eat dinner or play cards.
Half this movie could have spent its time on the boat before we ever got to the island. It may have been kind of boring and an interesting to a general audience but I think you would have ended up with a better product than what we in initially got.
Instead we end up of one-dimensional characters who we don't even end up liking all that much. Most of them are just whiny jerks who at one point or another we'll do something so incredibly stupid that you just want to see them get ripped apart.
One of which I swear is a discount James Caan.
This movie really bugged me. Not because it's bad.
But because with just a little bit of effort it could have been something decent. There's a potential here to have entertaining little dramatic film. But nobody seemed to care and they just threw a bunch of stuff together and hoped that nobody would be bothered with the final outcome. Perhaps they were all banking on us being intrigued by fishy zombie man. But you can only like them for so long before their gimmick starts to wear thin.
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