Boris Karloff, you say? I'll give it a watch.
Boris is a general in the Greek army. I think the year is given as 1912. The movie starts with Boris ordering a subordinate to shoot himself for some reason. I think the guy wasn't good enough at motivating his unit. Or something. Afterwards, Boris goes to visit his wife's grave, which is on a nearby island. Finding her grave vandalized, Boris heads to the only occupied house on the island to see what's up and ...
You know something? The movie is too boring for me to keep talking about it any longer.
There's a woman with catalepsy who ends up getting buried alive. She escapes her coffin somehow and stabs a couple of people with a trident, then jumps off a cliff. The End.
I was bored to tears with this movie. It's obvious that the director was bored while making it. I'll wager good money the writer was bored while writing it. Even the actors are bored. Even
Boris Karloff is so bored that he can't muster up any effort on the movie's behalf. He just goes through the motions, and you can practically see him thinking about being somewhere else -- anywhere else -- while he mechanically delivers his lines.
I'm not sure what went wrong. There's no reason for a scene in which a woman wakes up to realize she's been buried alive to be boring. But it is. And that's the most exciting thing in the entire movie. Maybe this was the fourth or fifth b-picture everyone involved had made that month and they were burned out. Maybe the whole thing was shot in such a hurry that no one was allowed to get any rest. I just don't know.
There is one thing of note in this movie, however.
Isle of the Dead can lay claim to featuring The Worst Actor Ever. His name is Skelton Knaggs. He has maybe five or six lines, yet those few lines caused me even more pain than three
Transformers movies' worth of John Turturro. I would never have thought it possible to give such a bad performance, especially in such a small role, but Skelton Knaggs pulls it off without even trying. Here's to you, Skelton Knaggs!
