2016 October Horror Challenge #29: "The Grim Reaper"

If there's anything I love as much as I love slasher movies, it's Italian horror flicks. I've only seen a few that I didn't like, so I tend to seek them out when I can, but this one just kind of fell into my lap when I was browsing through horror movies on Amazon this morning.  This one sounded fun, and surprise! It's a cheesy Italian horror flick from the 80s. Isn't life grand?

The plot is pretty sparse. There's a deranged and deformed killer living on a deserted island. He killed all the people who live on the island, but tourists keep stopping by and pissing him off, so he has to kill them, too.  Some tourists decide to pick up a hitchhiker (always a good idea in a horror movie) and she convinces them to give her a lift to the titular deserted island, and they all run afoul of the grim reaper.

I don't know who's smarter among the characters in this movie, the guy who thought it was a good idea to take his 8 month pregnant wife on an island hopping trip, the pregnant woman who decided to come along, or all of them for deciding to go to a creepy deserted island on the suggestion of a woman they barely know, but I guess it's OK because I got a sick little horror fun out of the deal.

EDIT:

OK, as I watched the end of this movie, I realized that I've actually seen it before several years ago.  In my defense, it was under a different title ("Anthrophagus: The Beast") and that version was uncut while this version was heavily edited, so I didn't recognize the only two scenes that I remember from that version of the movie. This was a year when I managed to watch over 200 horror movies in October ( no, I don't know how I did it either) and they all kind of blended together in my head into one big horror movie soup. Now that I realize I've seen the movie before, a few details have come back to me, but it's still fuzzy in my head.

The two scenes that I remembered were really gory and nasty, but they did obviously make an impact on me. I almost can't decide which version of the movie I like better. I was enthralled by the nasty gore of the uncut version, but this version seemed more atmospheric and creepy without the blood drenching every scene and getting in the way of the plot.

Some people have called this movie slow and boring, but I don't really agree there, I think the slower pace gives a feeling of mounting dread.  I saw a movie last October called "Killer Mermaid" that reminds me a lot of this movie (foreign tourists on an island get picked off by a monster). The more I think about it, the more I like this movie, in fact.  I kind of want to watch the uncut version again and see how it compares (apparently I have an all-consuming need to watch this movie as many times as possible).