Spikeopath Jules Verne must turn in his grave every time this daft adaptation of his story is shown any where in the world. As a lover of creaky creature features and sci-fi schlockers myself, I can understand to a small degree why the odd genre fan will stick up for this as a piece of fun and harmless entertainment, but they shouldn't kid themselves that this is not the lowest of the low of Z grade monster movie world. Something like Plan 9 has viable budget excuses, this, however, does not.In Terence Stamp and Peter Cushing you have two of Great Britain's most elegant actors appearing, and location work comes from the Canary Islands, Asturias and Puerto Rico. There was money there, definitely. But what follows is a crude attempt at a comedy/adventure movie that just embarrasses every one involved. In fact with Stamp and Cushing only really bookending the picture, you have to feel that they drugged them and never let them see the hour and half of film in between!Again I have to say that there are many a "man in rubber suit" movies that I enjoy and gladly have as part of my own DVD collection, yet this sullies the good name of low budget schlock creators. The bad "monster" creations aside for a moment, the acting reaches new levels of awfulness, so bad in fact that Ian Sera, David Hatton, Gasphar Ipua and Blanca Estrada are out acted by a chimp! The monsters are laughably bad, the sort you see when your 8 year old nephew makes a 5 minute monster movie short in your back garden. At one point our hapless castaways are menaced by seaweed monsters, they are all wearing gabardine trousers! (pants for our American friends). Funny? Yes it was. Insulting? Without doubt.Amazingly there's a real nice print on the DVD, with Andrés Berenguer's lovely location photography sticking out like a sore thumb (filmed in Dinavision Technicolor no less!). There's even the joyous site of a Gatling Gun firing bananas, while the presence of some genuine wildlife animals briefly lifts the spirit. Yet there is every chance that if those animals could talk? With all things considered...they too felt embarrassed to be in this hopeless waste of time and money. 1/10

Coventry Good Samaritan Peter Cushing pays $5 million for an island during an auction and hereby beats mean bastard Terence Stamp who knows for a fact there's a gold treasure buried somewhere. Cushing sends his nephew to the island to explore, accompanied by a clumsy professor as some sort of comic relief, but things already start to get awry from the ocean journey. One night the nephew finds the crew dead and the deck infested with cheesy seaweed monsters inspired by the Creature from the Black Lagoon. The ship explodes but the boy and his nutty professor wash ashore the island where they're welcomed by plenty of other abnormalities. There are dinosaurs, seaweed zombies, Arabs with sunglasses, gas-spurting caterpillars and a beautiful French female castaway. I got "lured" into watching "Mystery on Monster Island" because of the famous names (Cushing and Stamp in one movie!?!) in the cast and crew (Juan Piquer Simon made my personal favorites "Supersonic Man", "Pieces" and "Slugs") and also simply because it sounds awesome and purely nostalgic. In reality, however, this is a very misleading family/comedy/adventure movie instead of a mystery thriller. I can easily stand a little bit of comedy, but I really wasn't prepared for an uptight professor teaching table manners to a chimpanzee and diction to aboriginals. Another reason why you can tell this movie is family-friendly: the nephew remains faithful to his fiancée back home, even though the gorgeous French chick literally throws herself at him. I think it's highly unlikely any man will refuse (or able to resist) such an offer in this particular situation."Mystery on Monster Island" is somewhat reminiscent to the Sinbad movies; expect they're a lot more infantile. The special effects are really back-to-basic, with giant plastic dinosaurs and postcard images of waterfalls and cave entrances and even a little bit of exotic wildlife. The aboriginals set up a wooden fort faster than MacGyver and The A-Team combined and that where there's not a hardware store in sight. Where do they get their equipment? Peter Cushing and Terence Stamp perhaps receive top billing but naturally they only appear briefly in the film. Altogether not even five minutes, I estimate. There's another famous horror legend in the cast, namely Paul Naschy, but his character already dies within the first three minutes of the film. Absolute nobodies play the real main characters of the story. It's a total rip-off however you look at it. Avoid

MARIO GAUCI Unfortunately, this one constituted another gaffe within my ongoing Halloween challenge since it's not really a horror film despite title, director (he'd later make the gory PIECES [1983]) and presence of genre icons Peter Cushing and Paul Naschy! In fact, it's a typical Jules Verne adventure (based on his much-filmed "Mysterious Island") which proves surprisingly palatable – thanks also to a lively score – though unbalanced by comedy relief from the youthful hero's bumbling/cowardly sidekick, a Professor of Elocution whose name is constantly mispronounced ("T. Artelet not tartlet!").Cushing is the protagonist's rich uncle who has purchased an island, to which the boy is sent and where he meets a variety of dangers (pirates, cannibals, monsters) – eventually, there's a twist with respect to most of these, which thankfully explains the sheer poverty of the creatures on display! On the other hand, Naschy has a very small role at the start as a man who has struck gold – which is then coveted by his associates. The latter include Terence Stamp who, for obvious reasons, was Cushing's chief rival for the acquisition of the island; later on, he turns up on it (ludicrously shrouded from top to bottom complete with anachronistic goggles!) with his bandit horde to take the gold by force – to this end, he even plants a female 'shipwreck victim' to lure the hero into divulging the loot's whereabouts.Coupled with the far better GORILLA AT LARGE (1954; see above) on Fox's-by-way-of-MGM "Midnite Movies" banner, it offers the film both in English and Spanish. At first, always the stickler for a film's native country being its original language, I started watching the film in Spanish but when a narrator began translating the credits into Spanish and the English subtitles proved to be of the descriptive "hard of hearing" variety, I soon gave up my puritan pretensions and watched it with the more 'user friendly' English soundtrack on. At least, one does get to hear Cushing and Stamp reciting their own lines this way...

Jonathon Dabell I remember seeing this film on the Sci-Fi channel. I noticed that it had Peter Cushing in it, and I thought "Ah, a Peter Cushing movie I haven't seen. I'll tape it". What a mistake!Firstly, poor old Peter is hardly in it at all. Secondly, Terence Stamp is also billed, but also barely gets a look in. Thirdly, it's so cheap and tacky that even if they were in it for longer, it would still be unendurable. The monsters on Monster Island look like something that got rejected from an episode of Doctor Who for being too unconvincing. The plot is just a modest variation of The Lost World, but rather than a plateau in the middle of the Amazon, the action occurs on an island in the middle of uncharted waters.The director Simon has made some bad movies (Pieces springs to mind), but this is still a good bet for one of his worst. It may entertain very young kids, but for anyone over the age of 8 it just looks too fake. For any over the age of 18, it simply hasn't got an interesting enough storyline.Sorry Cushing fans, this one's not worth the effort.