Thunder Island

Another movie that recently showed up in the FXM lineup and is getting multiple airings is Thunder Island. It's going to be on again October 24 at 7:55 AM and October 25 at 6:00 AM.

Gene Nelson plays Billy Poole, who at the beginning of the movie is arriving on some Caribbean island where he is met by Anita (Miriam Colon). Billy is a hired assassin, and Anita is part of a group from another Latin American country. That country's dictator fled some time back, and went into exile on an outlying island in this country that is now his own private island, that nobody comes or goes to without El Presidente's permission. Obviously he's not about to let strangers like a hired assassin onto his island!

Billy has an idea, though. He charters a boat to get the lay of the land, so to speak. The boat is owned by another American, Vincent Dodge (Brian Kelly), who has come down to the Caribbean in part to escape the rat race in America and in part in the hopes that a change of scenery will save his marriage to his estranged wife Helen (Fay Spain). The first time Vincent takes the boat out with his daughter on board, they get as far as the dock of El Presidente's private island. As luck would have it, the ex-dictator has a daughter who is about the same age as Vincent and Helen's daughter, and she tries to make fast friends with the American, even offering her a trip to the private zoo the ex-president keeps. So Billy is going to have a good chance to get onto the island.

Of course, there's a bigger problem, which is that Vincent is never going to accept being part of an assassination plot if he has any say in the matter. And Billy has just enough of a conscience that he doesn't want to get an innocent girl involved. But Anita and her compatriots insist that the plot go forward, so sure enough it does....

Thunder Island is another of those short (about 65 minutes) movies that Fox was distributing around the time the Burton and Taylor Cleopatra was sucking all of the money out of the studio. These movies aren't nearly as bad as that provenance might lead people to believe, and some of them are actually pretty good. Thunder Island is one of the better of them that I've seen, although I do have to say I'd consider it the sort of thing that a decade later would probably have been conceived as a TV movie of the week. The acting is the decided weak point; the story isn't bad and the scenery (much of the movie was filmed on Puerto Rico) is nice.

One thing that intrigued me was the openiong credits. Among the people given screenwriting credit was one named Jack Nicholson. I looked it up, and sure enough, it's the famous Jack Nicholson who would soon enough quit screenwriting for a much more prominent career as an actor.

Thunder Island is on DVD courtesy of Fox's MOD scheme, although for a short B movie, that's rather pricey.