In a far-East POW camp, the inmates struggle to keep the commandant from learning the Japanese have lost WWII for fear of his threat to kill them all.
1958 was a memorable year for Hammer. It released Dracula and The Revenge of Frankenstein but it was the long-forgotten The Camp on Blood Island that was by far its most controversial release of the year. And possibly ever. Critics lined up to condemn the film as a sordid exercise in sadism and a disgracefully cheap use of the suffering of the war for entertainment. It was a smash hit.
The violence in the film is still on the strong side, but for today's audiences there's one thing that's far more likely to cause offence: white actors playing Japanese characters. It's possible to forgive benign Charlie Chan-style portrayals as just one of those silly things they did in the old days, but when the characters are uniformly vicious sadists then the film veers into racism - an accusation that was made of the film even in the 1950s. Respectable actors like Marne Maitland and Lee Montague get to don the ludicrous eye makeup and strut around unconvincingly but the true depths are reached when poor old Michael Ripper has to pass for Oriental. I can only assume there was a law stating that Ripper had to appear in every Hammer film and he was too well fed to play a prisoner.
If you can get past that then the film has its merits. It lacks the subtlety and emotion of A Town Like Alice or Bridge on the River Kwai but then it's more of a Boy's Own adventure in which the only function of the Japanese characters is to be nasty then go Arghh! when they get killed at the end. On that level it's a gripping tale that's well structured with enough characterisation to cover the lulls in the plot.
I suspect that some of the critics' antagonism is due to the fact that the end is a messy bloodbath in which the British also do horrible things in their struggle to survive. During the battle people get killed in what we now call friendly fire. The death of Michael Ripper's character is either murder or an actual war crime since he's the only Japanese we meet who's realised the war is over and is trying to surrender. It's all very distasteful for anyone who wants to believe in a good war.
The Camp on Blood Island may make uncomfortable viewing but it does make an interesting contrast to the bulk of British war films which tend to treat soldiers on the other side as victims of the war or of their political systems.
Script: Jon Manchip White, Val Guest
Director: Val Guest
Players: Andre Morell, Carl Mohner, Edward Underdown, Walter Fitzgerald, Phil Brown, Barbara Shelley, Michael Goodliffe, Richard Wordsworth, Mary Merrall, Michael Gwynn, Ronald Radd, Wolfe Morris, Edwin Richfield, Peter Wayn, Michael Brill, Barry Lowe, Max Butterfield, Alan McNaughton, Howard Williams, Michael Dea, Anthony Chinn, Kenji Tagaki, S. Goh, Jimmy Raphael, David Goh, Don Lee, Liliane Sottane, Grace Denbigh-Russell, Geoffrey Bayldon, Jacqueline Curtiss, Jan Holden, Betty Cooper, Anne Riddler, Barbara Lee, Milton Reid
The Camp on Blood Island at Amazon UK
