Intensity	Stupidity:Nudity Ratio 8:9	Budget Medium

Chris and Celia show up on the Greek island Mykonos looking for a room. At this point we are four minutes into the movie and Chris has taken about 300 photographs. Upon viewing a garden he is so moved that he turns his camera on it and fires up the motor drive to shoot 10 or 20 shots. And that is as subtle as this movie gets. This clever bit is meant to show us that Chris likes to take pictures. At any rate, Chris and Celia are soon settled in to their room and decide to roam the streets. Celia announces that she wants to make love, so she and Chris head into a phone booth for a quickie. Just to make it interesting, Chris decides to call his mom to let her know what he and Celia are doing, mom seems upset by the news. Mom's phone has been bugged and we see a guy sitting in a car also making a phone call (though he is not having sex with anyone at the time) to announce that the couple has been tracked to Greece. Once they are done with their call, Celia seems quite upset.

At this point, we have a pretty good setup. Chris and Celia make a good looking couple, Celia seems quite willing to take her clothes off, there is something mysterious about them and some organization is trying to track them down. At dinner Chris pretends that Celia is his cousin and she flirts with a French painter (who turns out to be a house painter). The next morning Celia is too sleepy to have sex, so Chris wanders off and finds a lamb tied up in the yard. The lamb does not turn down his request for sex, though does not look especially pleased about it and was probably less pleased about having it's throat cut afterward.

Chris and Celia wander off to the church that the painter is working on and while Chris hides and takes pictures, Celia seduces the painter. After she has sex with him, she seems upset again. So to cheer her up, Chris knocks out the painter, nails his hands to the ground and while Celia takes pictures, he kills the poor guy. This seems to lift Celia's spirits. After a couple more discussions and killings, we get the sense that the couple are killing sinners. We never get enough backstory to really understand what is going on. Remember that guy in the car? The one that seemed to know the whole story about our central characters? The one whose main role in the movie is obviously exposition? He finds his way to Chris and Celia's room and discovers the photographs and then chases after them a bit, all without saying a word. Chris knocks him out, ties him to an airplane and takes off. Yup, exposition guy dies without saying a word.

Eventually some events from Celia's dreams come to pass and she finds a new protector, though I use that term loosely. This guy sneaks back into the cave the couple is hiding out in and rapes Celia. When Chris wakes up and complains, the guy knocks Chris on the head and rapes him too. After beating up Chris a bit more, he throws him in a lime pit where Chris waits for his death and pleads with Celia to save him, calling her his sister. Eventually it rains, Chris screams and Celia has sex with the new guy. The end.

So, are they brother and sister? Probably, Chris calls her his wife a couple of times and his cousin at another, but this is just subterfuge. Mom seemed pretty upset to hear about them having sex, so it is a good bet that they are brother and sister. But this is what sucks about having no backstory. Are they biological siblings, is one adopted, are they both adopted, do they share one but not both parents? Are they killing out of guilt or because society is trying to keep them from being lovers even though they are not related? Presumably they have fled London because of something they did there, but the person chasing them does not seem to be a cop. For whatever reason, the director decided to put three musical interludes in the movie instead of some additional dialog or interesting subplot.

Visually the movie is interesting. Really all you have to do is make sure the exposure is good and the camera is in focus to get great shots on an island like Mykonos. White, blue and red are prominently displayed colors but there is no meaning associated with them beyond the obvious; white building and blue water are synonymous with Greece and red reminds of blood (oh, wait, it is blood). The movie bogs down quite a bit because of the music video scenes and the repetitive feel to the killings. Basically the victims do something bad usually involving sex with Chris or Celia. Photos are taken and blood is let. After Chris attacks the landlady in her shower, she manages to escape temporarily only to be accidentally killed by Chris. This death seemed to touch upon black comedy, but I think it was meant to be taken seriously. While Island of Death does have some interesting bits, it just drags a bit too much and wastes some interesting storylines. Perhaps it was just a bad translation, but I lean towards laziness as the real culprit. Nico Mastorakis (Nightmare at Noon) has created an entertaining film with plenty of WTF moments and lots of nudity. In a way I understand the lack of backstory and his refusal to define his characters, by not giving us any definitions of his characters he can do whatever he wants with them. So when he has Chris screw a goat, we don't say "gee, I didn't think he would do that". Chris and Celia are shown to have nothing that we would call morals or scruples, so every outlandish action they take seems okay. Still, it is not like logic rears its ugly head anywhere in this movie.

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