Fans of Euro-horror flicks - Portland's video/DVD store Movie Madness has a whole section devoted to this genre - can't afford to miss Sergio Martino's gut-busting "L'isola degli uomini pesce" (called "Screamers" in the United States). Here's the lowdown: some shipwreck survivors land on an uncharted Caribbean island in 1891. The island is inhabited by a landowner, a scientist (Joseph Cotten) and his daughter (Barbara Bach). Sure enough, it turns out that the landowner is making the scientist create a race of fish-men. And while the fish-men remain calm as long as they can drink their potion, they get nasty otherwise.

This movie is sort of a mixture of genres: Euro-horror, swashbuckling, voodoo, and maybe a little bit of "The Island of Dr. Moreau". But it's mostly an excuse to have the fish-men disembowel trespassers; ya gotta love that! I wouldn't be surprised if the Euro-horror genre gave Quentin Tarantino some of his ideas for "Grindhouse". After all, the European horror directors have no scruples about what they show. This is one that you're sure to like.

So Joseph Cotten is the only cast member from an Alfred Hitchcock movie (I mean "Shadow of a Doubt") who later co-starred with Ringo Starr's soon-to-be wife and Audrey Hepburn's ex (by whom I mean Mel Ferrer) in an Italian horror flick. The things that we see in life...