User Reviews

A pretty entertaining story, a sort ghost tale, without being one actually, and not in the deep British country side, but frightening enough to waste some pleasant time, I assure you. Ginger Rogers is surprising here in a not foreseeable performance. Well, I won't repeat the plot line already told above, but it's more a romance and talkative soap opera than a horror movie. The kind of story you often watched in the forties, such as Lewis Allen's films: UNINVITED, UNSEEN...A drama definitely well made by a Hollywood vet John Brahm, a film noir master who worked for TV industry afterwards.

Not bad, but certainly not my cup of tea.

"Terror Island" as a title comes on way too strong, for this fine Chrysler Theater thriller that boasts an amazing front line of iconic actresses: Ginger Rogers, Katharine Ross and Carol Lawrence. Its weak link is casting Donnelly Rhodes as the male lead, a truly forgettable (though prolific) actor from Canada.

The Gothic story is set on a remote island where Ginger and Katharine live in an old mansion, and have plenty of family secrets. Rhodes is Ginger's adopted son, returning there with his second wife played by Carol, and a very early foreshadowing by veteran director John Brahm has a long shot of a white nightgowned woman flitting through the forest -could this be the ghost of Rhodes' first, deceased, wife? Ross plays Ginger's crippled daughter, and Ginger's casting is part of that '60s "grand dames" in leading roles in horror movies a la Bette Davis and Joan Crawford.

Too many ghost story cliches detract from the show, but probably are mandatory for this genre. The flesh and blood leading ladies make up for these lapses, but they can't cover the hole in the production left by Donnelly -a lookalike for Joaquin Phoenix but not much of an actor. IMDb reveals that he was actually in one of Katharine's breakthrough movies, "Butch Cassidy", but I didn't remember him from that or any dozens of TV appearances he made that I watched once upon a time (notably as a "Battlestar Galactica" regular).

Hollywood, being what it is, I look forward (not) to a Streaming remake starring Jessica Lange, Lady Gaga, Sarah Paulson and Joaquin Phoenix, produced by Ryan Murphy. And the remake would have to play up the faux incest theme that permeates this story.