Not My Kind of Vacation Spot

Isle of the Dead (1945)
Director- Mark Robson
Starring- Borlis Karloff, Ellen Drew, Marc Cramer


Balkan War, 1912. General Pherides (Karloff), agrees to show Oliver (Cramer), a colleague, his wife's grave that happens to be located near their current battlefield. Finding the grave disturbed, the general demands to know whow's responsible. He finds out from a local woman that the townspeople did it out of a superstitious fear of vorvolaka (vampire) attacks, a fear spawned by the plague killing off large portions of the island. Initially highly skeptical of the vorvolaka story, the general gets himself sucked into the superstition, and becomes highly suspicious of a caretaker of an older woman. The older woman has a fainting disease which resembles death, accompanied by a then-logical fear of premature burial. She of course tells no one but a french doctor who soon falls victim to the plague.

Predictably the woman faints, everyone thinks she's dead, she wakes up in a coffin, goes nuts and takes a knife to the superstitious women who got Pherides worked, then Pherides himself.

This movie was great on so many levels. I'll try to cover them quickly.
First, Karloff as a hardened general (who sends on of his own friends off to be executed for negligence!), excellent casting there. Second, the whole science v. superstition debate is alive and well in this movie, and in the end, septicemic plague wins the blame. It was a little depressing, however, to see the archaeologist character opting for prayer to Hermes over medical observation to deal with the plague.

Rating: This movie gets a solid 5/5 Bonedaddies for playing out like a horror flick and the monster turning out to be disease and human reactions to it.