I Escaped from Devil's Island

Despite an air of unrelieved cruddiness, relentless machismo, bad acting and over-insistent animal imagery of a dog-eats-dog nature, this Corman-produced epic, unlike Papillon, at least adopts the right approach. As the title suggests, the film is very much on the level of those old 'True Adventure' stories. Jim Brown has no apparent motive for escaping, but then prison life is painted in sufficiently graphic terms for that not to matter. Favouritism and brutality are rife, prisoners are prepared to rat on each other, and the film admits (albeit crudely) an aura of homosexuality and political agitation that was never properly allowed to infiltrate Papillon. Life after the escape looks like a rejected draft of the other film, and includes an encounter with lepers, a tumble with a native girl, and an equally perfunctory ending. Not exactly recommended, unless you misspent your youth reading stories like 'How I Wrestled with a Python and Won'.