Attack of the Beast Creatures (1985)

Hell Island

Cast:

Robert Nolfi is John Trieste
Julia Rust is Cathy
Robert Lengyel is Case Quinn
Lisa Pak is Diane
Frank Murgalo is Philip
John Vichiola is Mr. Morgan

What the IMDB says about the plot:

Survivors of a shipwreck wash up on an island, and run into zombies.

Plot:

What a artistic and classy title for any movie...

1920, North Atlantic Ocean, a ship sinks. A lifeboat is full of hysterical people ensue. The current draws them away from the other lifeboats. They land on an island. The people set Brewer, who was wounded in the sinking, on the beach before they search the island for food and water.

Pat finds a water pool. Unfortunately, he discovers that the water has acid which melts him. The men bury his body as the women are still looking for food. Everyone is getting a strange feeling of being watched. A couple of the guys go to check on Brewer and get the supplies from the lifeboat. However, they find Brewer’s skeleton.

That night, the group sits around the fire. They decide to stand guard through the night.

Do you get the feeling that someone is watching us, Rockwell? Suddenly, little glowing eyed monsters attack. TOO DARK TO SEE scene ensues. The group manages to set a few of the beast creatures on fire and drive them away. They start making plans.

Morning, the group decides to head to higher ground.

I'll take 3 soyburgers... Beast creatures are watching them and do some bite and run campaigns.
Little beast creature sitting in a tree... K-I-S-S-I-N-G...

As the group starts to get more wounded and devoured by the beast creatures.

I wasn't in Trilogy of Terror, and I've never been a Krite Morgan, the new wounded jerk, pitches a fit and runs off from the group. A couple of the guys follow him but can’t catch him before he falls in the acid pit and gets skeletonized.

The group is now down 2 women and 3 men: Cathy, Diane, John, Case, and Phil. They reach the higher ground and see beast creatures around a giant beast creature idol.

No one better disturb the First Temple of the Holy Beast Creatures... The group decides to head back to the beach for the lifeboat. The beast creatures start to chase after them.

Phil falls and is impaled by a trap. Case is sent head on to the boat before Cathy and Diane are. John stays with Phil. The beast creatures attack Cathy and Diane.

This is still not as painful as Dreamaniac

John leaves Phil after he dies.

The beast creatures attack Case.

John is able to save Cathy. They run to the beach with the beast creatures in hot pursuit. Flashback to all the dead bodies. On the beach, John and Cathy head into the water and see an approaching ship. A lifeboat picks them up and allows them to escape.

What I say:

There has to be some finite number of movies. That number may be more than physically possible for anyone to actually watch in a human lifetime. People can get jaded over movies. Even with the explosion of DVDs and newer formats, quite a few numbers have yet to be extended into better formats. Quite a few movies start to slip through the cracks and can be forgotten. That is a shame, not all these forgotten movies are great but some are still memorable in some fashions. A movie with a shipwrecked bunch that has to fight off killer devil baby dolls should be one the memorable bunch.

Imagine the Love Boat cast sinking and landing on Gilligan's Island and having to survive monsters that look like Critters? Somehow, Captain Stuebing, Gopher and Charo having to battle Critters is an idea that can bring sunshine to an otherwise dreary day...Attack of the Beast Creatures is about a small group that has to contend with devil doll-sized monsters.

The beast creatures look like the killer Pinata from Pinata Survival Island and the Critters. The creatures also ran as fast as the Roadrunner...The beast creatures jump on people. The actors have to act as if the small monsters are attacking them...Holding the beasts' arms away from them and try not to flail. It is almost the same principle how in For Your Height Only had a stunt doll for Weng Weng when the bad guys through him around.

For such a low budget movie, Attack of the Beast Creatures isn't that bad. However, that doesn't automatically make it a good movie, either. There are a couple of TOO DARK TO SEE scenes but it is a lot easier to see than pitch black Alien Versus Predator: Requiem. They use the same attack scenes almost as often as stock footage. It could be that the editing got the attack scenes mixed up. They even had a flashback to show all the bodies again in some attempt to get the audience to think the body count was doubled.

Many monster movies never explain why there are monsters. However, having a guy melt from an acid pool for no apparent reason is a little harder to follow. I was wondering why was there an acid pool. Later in the movie after Phil was impaled, there was one line about him falling into a trap. That'd imply the beast creatures were intelligent enough to set traps, maybe even have a pool of acid.

The worst crime of any movie is to be boring. Somehow, any movie that has swarms of little monsters that attack a shipwrecked group in the 1920s does have some charm to it. This isn't high art and it accepts that fact. Attack of the Beast Creatures is just a cheap monster movie which doesn't try to drown the audience in its artistic pretensions.

It doesn't have brilliant characterizations of characters. Special effects can't replace a lack of characters. The past decade, so many movies try to replace anything interesting with special effects. It didn't work for Cabin Fever which has to be the movie with the most annoying and hateful characters imaginable. Attack of the Beast Creatures doesn't have the stereotypically annoying characters that were in the mid-1980s monster movies. Morgan, the annoying wounded guy, could have given lessons to the jerk from the 1968's Night of the Living Dead. No teenagers in any of their annoying glories.

Point to Ponder:
Attacking Beast Creatures? Checking a thesaurus...Isn't "Beast" synonmous with "Creature"?

Quotable Dialogue
"That guy's got a lot of nerves."
"When we got to him, his body was picked clean to the bones."
"What were those things?"
Morals of the Story
Massive chest wounds are scream inducing.
North atlantic islands are typically very tropical.
Monster bites hurt.