Simply Perfect

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

After murdering a guard at an outpost somewhere in the Pacific, a man by the name of "Lee Johnston" (Don Durant) and his innocent brother, "Chris Johnston" (Bill Cord) make the decision to escape by boat to another location where they can hide out. Along the way, a hurricane hits and their boat sinks. As luck would have it they are rescued by some female pearl divers and brought ashore to a nearby island. While there they are treated hospitably and told that a police boat will come by to pick them up in about 10 days. Needless to say, they don't like the sound of that and make plans to leave before it arrives. At any rate, for a low-budget production the director (Roger Corman) did a pretty good job of taking advantage of the scant resources at his disposal. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough to pull this movie into average territory. For example, the tropical scenery was beautiful but the black and white film failed to do it justice. Likewise, some of the scenes involving the sharks looked like they came from a National Geographic film which were simply reused for special effects. In any case, the movie ended up being somewhat sluggish and for that reason I rate it as below average.

This is a very early Roger Corman film, though it bears little similarity to most his brilliant films. While this is a low-budget film, the dialog, acting and direction are so lackluster that it's hard sticking with the film.The dull mess begins with a couple crooks doing bad things (such as bashing a guy over the head). Eventually, their boat is wrecked and they find themselves on a Polynesian island (actually one of the Hawaiian ones) populated with only women. Apparently some company owns the place and the women spend their time working for the pearl diving industry. The crooked guys want in on the action and the ladies are amazingly dull and listless--so it's easy to understand that they seem somewhat immune to their charms. There's more to the film than this, but who cares?! The film lacks the cheesy charm you'd find in a Corman film like "Wasp Women" or the humor of "Bucket of Blood" or the creepiness of his Poe-like tales. Instead, it looks like it was just an excuse to go on location for a working vacation.Dull and pointless.

One way of looking at this movie is that it's one of the worst to come from its time and place. In this context, we see two young, good-looking hunks, both outlaws, who end up stranded on a tropical island inhabited by primitive hot white women who all speak broken English and cling to weird taboos and traditions, such as believing the sharks are gods, or some such nonsense.Another way of looking at this movie is that clever editing could have turned it into a touching story about two men who, while vacationing in Hawaii near the Hospital for Brain Damaged Women, discover just how attracted they are to each other soon after one of them tries to stop being gay by dating one of the native women. In this sense, one could consider this movie a well done piece of cinema history, especially since it was ahead of its time on the topic of civil rights.It is by imagining the latter scenario that this movie can be made entertaining enough to sit though. If you watch this by taking everything at face value, this flick is way too boring to finish. I'd say the only major motivation anyone would have to watch this movie is if they'd purchased some sort of boxed set that includes this, which is, incidentally, the only reason I watched it.The full synopsis goes like this: Two young, well-built dudes end up stranded on a Hawaiian beach and decide to never wear shirts again. They encounter a civilization of aforementioned broken English-speaking women led by a psychotic mother matron character who is obsessed with local tradition, which involves human sacrifice to appease the shark god. This means feeding a few of the young hotties to a mid-sized shark that may or may not be alive.One of the guys, Chris (Bill Cord) eventually falls in love with one of the native babes, Mahia (Lisa Montell), much to the irritation of Chris's ambiguously gay partner, Jim (Don Durant). Since the mother matron (Jeanne Gerson) is a nasty old woman who hates men, she decides to have Mahia sacrificed to the shark god to make herself feel better about neither Chris nor Jim finding her attractive.SHE GODS OF SHARK REEF: it's not the worst thing I've ever seen, but it's far from the best. The good news is that this sucker is, I do believe, public domain. Those who might search for it could possibly locate it online for free.

This is not a science fiction movie as the collection states. It begins with a theft of some guns. It looks promising. Who are these people the men are stealing from? How will they retaliate. They do their deed and off they go. The next thing, they are washed ashore on an island full of Polynesian women (well, most of them are). They are welcomed in and given some pretty cool swim suits. The hang around but realize that when "the boat" comes, one of them is going to have to face the music for his checkered past. The good brother falls in love with a young woman when he realizes she is going to be sacrificed to the shark god. He rescues her and then kidnaps the old lady who runs a pearl diving business on the island. She obviously does business with non-islanders but also continues to do these ritual sacrifices. Apparently, the population of the island is getting smaller. The young women seem to go willingly. The movie ends about as suspected. It's just an endless, talky, somewhat pointless piece of seaweed. Now where can I get one of those swimsuits?