Universal’s HORROR ISLAND (1941) was rushed into production in the spring of 1941 to be sent to theaters as the B-picture on a double bill with MAN MADE MONSTER (1941).  The word “rushed” doesn’t really begin to tell the tale… from the start of principal photography on March 3rd of that year, only 23 days elapsed before HORROR ISLAND was being previewed for exhibitors.  Budgeted at just under $100,000, the “Universal Mystery Thriller” had a punishing 12-day shooting schedule, which required director George Waggener to push his cast and crew around the clock, shooting around existing sets with a script by Maurice Tombragel and Victor McLeod that no doubt seemed, even at the time, derivative and corny.  And yet it is precisely these shortcomings which give the thoroughly unremarkable HORROR ISLAND its undeniable charm.

The project originated with an original story, Terror of the South Seas, by Alex Gottlieb.  Born in Ukraine, Russia, in 1906, Gottlieb was the brother-in-law of Broadway impresario Billy Rose.  Raised in Kansas, Gottlieb headed for New York straight out of the University of Wisconsin and worked as a reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle while writing plays, some of which made it to Broadway.  (Gottlieb later cowrote the play SUSAN SLEPT HERE, which RKO adapted for the big screen in 1954 with Dick Powell and Debbie Reynolds in the leads.)  He got his start in Hollywood as a press agent and wrote material for radio stars Edgar Bergen, Eddie Cantor, George Jessel and Al Jolson.  After selling his first script to Columbia, he wrote a number of screenplays and original stories for Republic Pictures and Universal.  By 1941, Gottlieb was an associate producer on Universal’s profitable string of Abbott and Costello comedies, beginning with BUCK PRIVATES, released in January of that year.

All due respect to Alex Gottlieb (who died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1988, at the age of 81), the script for HORROR ISLAND is perhaps its least impressive component.  One part THE CAT AND THE CANARY (Paramount adapted the famous stage play in 1939 as a vehicle for Bob Hope), one part THE GHOST BREAKERS (1940) and a jigger of just about every other movie about a group of strangers who come together in an old (haunted or otherwise) house or castle on an island – Agatha Christie’s classic whodunit And Then There Were None had just been published in 1939 – HORROR ISLAND is a slumgullion of established spookshow tropes and time-honored gags begged, borrowed and stolen outright from earlier (and invariably better) films.  (All these elements and more could be found in the Abbott and Costello horror comedy HOLD THAT GHOST, which followed HORROR ISLAND to the theaters a few months later.)  And yet if you’re a classic horror or mystery film fan, this failing is more than forgivable.  While some purists prize novelty in the make-up of their thrillers, the rest of us don’t really care how we get into the haunted castle… just as long as we get there in time to get a good seat.

HORROR ISLAND is 60 minutes of energetic hokum, gamely played by a capable cast of second-tier contract players.  Fresh from THE MUMMY’S HAND (1940), brawny Dick Foran and dimpled Peggy Moran are reteamed as another pair of unlikely lovebirds – he a down-on-his-luck Princeton grad running a dying business out of a schooner named The Skidoo, she the daughter of a wealthy Manhattan yachtsman.  A traffic accident brings the two together just as Foran’s creditor evading Bill Martin has lucked into an invitation by peg-legged sailor Leo Carillo to join him on a treasure hunt.  (It’s a matter of the flimsiest convenience that the hidden treasure, worth roughly $20,000 in Spanish gold, is located somewhere in property that Martin happens to own.)  Complicating matters is the machinations of “The Phantom,” a caped figure who has stolen half the treasure map from Carrillo and beats Martin’s boat to Morgan Island and its foreboding “Ghost Castle.”  In order to finance the trip, Martin has sold tickets for a weekend treasure hunt, drawing a ship load of disparate and infinitely suspicious characters into this thickening web of deceit, mystery, fear and cold-blooded murder.

You know the drill… sliding panels, trap doors, perambulating suits of armor, shifting stone blocks, treasure maps, torture chambers, skeletons, crossbow arrows whizzing through the air, bodies piling up like cord wood and a villain who keeps a record of his kills chalked above the drawing room hearth.  Foran and Moran are a charming mismatched couple and Fuzzy Knight is amusing as Foran’s stuttering sidekick (the pair anticipates the comic partnership of Humphrey Bogart and Walter Brennan in TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT [1944] by three years), while Carrillo is a reliable ethnic (“Solid mahogany,” he brags of his wooden leg.  “I carve it myself out of an old py-anna.”) and Lewis Howard ably fills the shoes of the Requisite Drunk, managing to be less irritating than Charles Ruggles in MURDER IN THE ZOO (1932) but less memorable than Robert Armstrong in THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME (1932).  Extensive use is made in early scenes of Universal’s familiar Waterfront Street, while set pieces used originally in Tod Browning’s DRACULA (1931) and Rowland V. Lee’s TOWER OF LONDON (1939) were trucked in to stand for sections of the Ghost Castle.  Although director of photography Elwood Bredell cloaks these familiar elements with sufficient shadow to make them seem fresh, Hans Salter’s score is all recycled cues – mind you, all of them great!  Original it ain’t.  Thrilling?  Eh, not so much… but fun and breezy it is and not the worst way to kill sixty minutes.  HORROR ISLAND even had a fan in that hanging judge of horror movie mavens, William K. Everson, who praised the “excellent atmospheric sets and lighting” and found the production overall to be a “very neat little ‘B’ (emphasis his).

Long unseen and mostly forgotten, HORROR ISLAND has been included on a new box set of Universal fright films given the unwieldy collective title Universal Horror Classic Movie Archive.  The set picks up some oddments not included on the studio’s franchise collections (Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, The Wolfman, The Creature from the Black Lagoon) and adds to HORROR ISLAND and MAN MADE MONSTER (a vehicle for Lon Chaney, Jr.) the light hearted THE BLACK CAT (1941) with Broderick Crawford, Bela Lugosi and a young Alan Ladd, CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN (1943) and the truly strange swamp-set fright flick NIGHT MONSTER (1942), which also features Lugosi in one of his post-DRACULA red herring roles, alongside Ralph Morgan, Nils Asther, Lionel Atwill and Don Porter in a tale of murder in and around a secluded country estate.  Although we’re grateful for the digital release of all these movies, the grab bag nature of the box set is a bit disheartening.  MAN MADE MONSTER (which earned a name-check in the 1971 comedy THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT, in which insomniac Barbra Streisand likens herself to Chaney’s “Electric Man”) is good enough to have merited a stand-alone release, or at least one that made its inclusion more prominent.  Likewise, although CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN is a better title than a story, its inclusion on its lonesome telegraphs that Universal has little or no intention to release its two sequels, JUNGLE WOMAN (1944) or THE JUNGLE CAPTIVE (1945) to DVD any time soon.  But this is just nitpicking, really, as there is a lot of fun to be had with the Universal Horror Classic Movie Archive in general and HORROR ISLAND in particular and maybe, maybe if we’re all good MonsterKids and buy a lot of copies, Universal will surprise us with a Volume 2.

Sources:

Universal Horrors: The studio’s Classic Films, 1931-1946 by Michael Brunas, John Brunas and Tom Weaver

More Classics of the Horror Film: Fifty Years of Great Chillers by William K. Everson

Alex Gottlieb obituary, The New York Times, October 12, 1988