Camp at Blood Island (1958)

 "No room for shirkers!"

This film is a definite oddity- a non-horror Hammer film (this weekend's theme) made in 1958, several films into the company's horror era, directed by Val Guest and starring Andre Morell, both familiar faces from late '50s horror.

Yet it feels utterly Hammer. It's weird to see Morell not playing a maverick scientist, and the token Amercan is played not by Steve McQueen but by Luke Skywalker's Uncle Owen. There's the obligatory cut price Charles Bronson figure. The sadly late Barbara Shelley is in a very Tenko role, and she's wonderful. It's all very lurid, with staggering amounts of torture and brutal violence for its time- but this probably got hrough the censors precisely because Japanese POW camps really were as bad as this and worse.

The budget is low, the direction is no more than competent, yet Morell is a compelling lead and there's a surprisingly plot that makes this a much better watch than its reputation. The film is gripping throughout, which I wasn't expecting.

The film is, of course, incredibly racist, with the Japanese officers portrayed by made up white actors. And yet this particular racism- although nothing can exactly excuse the yellowface make-up, used in other contexts in contemporary films, and we shouldn'r excuse the various European colonial empires in the Far East or anywhere else- can perhaps not be described as prejudice. Many British people, including my Grandad Gordon, fought in Burma and elsewhere, witnessing many Japanese atrocities and refusing to buy Japanese cars for their whole lives. I'm a lover of Japan, and Japanese culture, but this generation of Japanese soldiers, treating their prisoners of war with sheer cruelty, were utterly without honour.