Island of Death

Did You Know?

• Mastorakis filmed on location in Mykonos in early 1975 on a budget of US$30,000.
• All cast members were amateurs; Mastorakis approached Americans on the street to ask if they could act.
• Mastorakis wrote, produced, directed, photographed, and edited the film himself.

Plot

Christopher, an American man, and Celia, a British woman, rent a home on Mykonos for their purported honeymoon. The locals believe them to be a normal newlywed couple, but they are sexual sadists and murderers who left London to kill abroad. The morning after arrival, Christopher rapes a goat and kills it. They meet Jean-Claude, a French painter attracted to Celia; they nail him to the ground in a crucifixion pose and pour paint down his throat until he chokes, then dump his body in the ocean.

The couple is invited to a gay wedding between a middle-aged American and his Greek lover. They break in on the wedding night; Christopher chases the elderly man into the streets and stabs him to death, while Celia shoots the lover in the head and stages it as a murder-suicide. They kill Foster, an American police officer trailing them, by hanging him from his plane and flying over the ocean. Celia begins to resist Christopher's murders.

He goes to Patricia's house, has sex with her, urinates on her, beats her unconscious, and decapitates her with a bulldozer. While Christopher fishes, two hippies attempt to rape Celia in her bath; Christopher returns, kills one with a speargun and drowns the other in the toilet. He targets a lesbian bartender, Leslie, who is interested in Celia. Celia visits Leslie, who offers heroin; Christopher knocks Leslie unconscious and injects a lethal dosage, then uses an aerosol spray and candle to burn her face.

Themes

Writers David Kerekes and David Slater note that Island of Death contains commentary on Greece's Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition, whether intentional or not. Christopher's attempts to cleanse Mykonos parallel the country's intolerance of transgressions against Christian values. He is repulsed by others' perversions yet blind to his own wickedness, being more corrupt than those he castigates. The character's name parallels Saint Christopher, referencing the Crusades.

Release

Island of Death was distributed theatrically in the United Kingdom by Winstone Films in November 1977 under the title A Craving for Lust, in a truncated cut removing eighteen minutes. It opened at London's Cinema Moulin on a double bill with Her Naked Flesh, grossing £50,901 during its month-long run. In the United States, North American distribution rights were purchased by Merwin Bloch, then passed to Bryanston Distributing Company, which had released Deep Throat, Flesh for Frankenstein, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

After Bryanston faced obscenity charges and an executive was jailed, the film was not released. An auction scheduled for 23 August 1976 in New York City was cancelled due to legal complications, reverting rights to Bloch. The film did receive a theatrical release in Indianapolis, Indiana on 9 April 1976 under the title Isle of Perversion with an X rating. It was released on VHS in the UK by AVI Video in November 1982 and became one of 39 titles banned during the video nasty panic, remaining banned between 1984 and 2011.

Image Entertainment released the fully uncut version on DVD in the US on 18 February 2003. Arrow Films released an uncut DVD in the UK in September 2011 and a Blu-ray on 26 May 2015 in North America and the UK.

Reception

Screen International gave the film moderate praise, noting it was worthy of better than sexploitation regulars, with Mastorakis using Mykonos scenery to contrast sunlit peace with the dark turbulence of the leads' minds. Patrick Fleet of the Bristol Post praised it as far better than its title and plot suggest, calling it a remarkable achievement for the Greek amateurs. AllMovie gave a mixed review, calling it one of the most perverse exploitation films and a laundry list of outrages.