Zombie Island Massacre (1984)

Zombie Island Massacre arrived in 1984 courtesy of Troma Entertainment, the New York independent label that had already made a cottage industry out of low-budget exploitation fare. Troma's output from this period is not exactly known for restraint or subtlety, and the title alone tells you what the pitch meeting probably sounded like. The film was directed by John Carter, who also took the editing chair, from a screenplay by Logan O'Neill and William Stoddard. The premise is straightforward enough: a group of American tourists on a Caribbean holiday join a night tour of a nearby island, observe a local voodoo ceremony, and find themselves stranded and picked off one by one. On paper, that is a serviceable enough skeleton for a low-budget horror picture, the kind of thing that filled the horror section of every video rental shop in the mid-1980s. Whether the film does anything worthwhile with that skeleton is, of course, another matter entirely.

The cast is led by David Broadnax and Rita Jenrette, with George Peters, Debbie Ewing, and Ralph Monaco among the group of unfortunate holidaymakers. Jenrette was perhaps the most recognisable name attached to the production at the time, having appeared in the press for reasons unrelated to film before turning to acting. The ensemble here functions largely as a collection of bodies to be moved around the scenery, which is a fair description of what most Troma productions required of their performers in this era. The film was shot on location, giving it at least the visual advantage of genuine Caribbean surroundings rather than a car park in New Jersey dressed with potted plants.

On the craft side, cinematography is credited to Robert M. Baldwin and Jack Priestley, and between them they manage to capture the lush, sun-baked landscape with a certain postcard warmth that sits in odd contrast to the film's horror ambitions. The night sequences, by necessity, take on a murkier quality, the kind of low-light photography that was as much a product of budget as of intention. The score comes from Harry Manfredini, who was at this point well established as the composer behind the Friday the 13th series, and his work here carries the familiar stings and orchestral lurches that genre audiences of the period would have recognised immediately. Carter, doubling as editor, keeps the cutting fairly functional rather than propulsive, which has a noticeable effect on the film's pacing in its extended middle passages. For a companion piece in horror that handles atmosphere and dread rather differently, see also Pontypool, and I also covered the genre from its golden age in my review of Bride of Frankenstein.

There are no zombies.

I want to be precise about this, because I think it matters. There is an island. There is, eventually, something loosely resembling a massacre, in the sense that people die. But zombies? Not a one. What there is instead is an interminable stretch of tourists wandering around a Caribbean location looking confused, a voodoo ceremony that raises precisely zero of the undead, and a plot that eventually reveals itself to be something far more mundane and far less interesting than anything the title implies. I felt robbed. Genuinely, personally robbed.

The film opens with a group of tourists on a Caribbean holiday, and if you're thinking that sounds like a reasonable setup for some low-budget zombie carnage, well, so was I. For a good while, though, it's just tourism. People on a bus. People at a voodoo ritual that's played fairly straight. People getting back on the bus. There's a brief moment where you think something might actually happen, and then it doesn't, and then more people get on more buses. I checked how much time was left more than once. That's never a good sign.

When the killing does start, it's not especially inventive or entertaining in the way that even bad horror can sometimes be. There's a kind of competence floor that watchable schlock manages to stay above, where the badness itself becomes fun, where you're laughing with the film even if the film doesn't know you're laughing. This doesn't reach that floor. It's just slow and dull and deeply, deeply dishonest about what it contains. If you want your horror to actually deliver on its zombie promise, you'd be better off with Nightmare City (1980), which at least throws its monsters at you with some enthusiasm, even if those monsters are doing things zombies technically shouldn't be able to do.

I try to be fair to films. I try to meet them on their own terms, to ask what they were going for and whether they got there. But when a film calls itself Zombie Island Massacre and contains no zombies, it has broken its own terms before I've even pressed play. That's not a creative decision I can respect or a limitation I can forgive. It's just false advertising dressed up in a lurid title to catch the eyes of people flicking through the horror section, which is exactly what it caught.

The performances are flat, the tension is absent, and the reveal of what's actually going on lands with all the impact of a damp tissue. I won't spoil it, not because it's worth protecting, but because describing it would require me to think about it again, and I'd rather not. Some films earn their bad reputation. Some films are misunderstood. This one is neither. It's just bad, straightforwardly and without redemption, a film that couldn't even be bothered to include the thing it put in its own name.

Half a star, and that half is for the location, which is admittedly quite nice. The Caribbean looks lovely. I hope whoever filmed it had a pleasant time there. I hope they enjoyed it more than I enjoyed watching this film.

I keep coming back to that title, and I think it tells you everything you need to know about the relationship this film has with its audience. There is a long and perfectly honourable tradition of exploitation pictures that over-promise and under-deliver, and some of them are enormous fun despite themselves. I reviewed Final Destination and I also wrote about Pulse, two horror films that at least have the decency to follow through on what they set out to do, for better or worse. Zombie Island Massacre does not earn that kind of generosity. The Caribbean really does look lovely, though. Someone should make a nicer film there.

Rating: ½  | Year: 1984  | Watched: 2025-09-09

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from the 1980s: Nightmare City (1980) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Style Wars (1983) · Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers (1980)
More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)