Halloween Movie Review: Don't Go Back to the Island (1977)

Few people know about this ill-conceived take-off-cum-rip-off of Maurice Sendak's classic Where the Wild Things Are. I can only guess that if Mr Sendak himself ever saw it he wisely chose to ignore it rather than give it any undue publicity by suing the hell out of the producers. It's a clumsy, terribly acted slasher flick with hilariously bad monster costumes and gruesome gore effects. The plot centers on a teenage hoodlum named Max, who bullies his equally dumb friends into stealing a speedboat and motoring out to the remote island he used to visit as a kid.

There, in the manner of slasher pics, each of the teens meets a grisly end, but not before Max sets himself up as a petty tyrant over his peers. I'm sure the writer/director thought he was making a very clever allusion to Lord of the Flies, but it's as hamfisted as everything else about this movie.

Eventually, having betrayed all of his friends/subjects, Max is alone, chased by every monster on the island. Interminably chased, in a night-for-night sequence that seems to last for twenty minutes and fails to generate any tension at all. In the end, within sight of the boat Max is caught, swiftly dismembered and greedily devoured.

The director manages one of his few effective shots at the very end of his movie, as the camera pans slowly away from the gory feast and tracks back into the woods, accompanied by a voice-over that's actually rather haunting:

...the blood ran out over earth
and in and out of stones
and through the grass
and into the pile of his very own bones
where they had made a supper of him

and it was still hot.

Sneak Preview: D&D 4e Monster Building and Customization

One of the highly touted aspects of the new edition of D&D is the ease with which DMs will be able to create and customize monsters to challenge their players. In fact, I just learned the DMs will be able build monsters on the fly, using just a few rolls of a trusty twenty-sider:

1	black	blade	brute
2	blood	blood	creeper
3	bone	bond/bound	delver
4	death	claw	fiend
5	demon	cloak/cloaked	filcher
6	doom	doom	foamer
7	dread	fang	gnasher
8	flame	fiend	horde/hordling
9	ghost	fire	howler
10	grim	gaunt	hulk
11	ice	haunt	lasher
12	iron	horn	leaper
13	night	maw	racer
14	poison	rake	reaver
15	razor	scale	ripper
16	spell	spike	scourge
17	stone	tusk	sneak
18	storm	warp/warped	swarm
19	thunder	wing	titan
20	wind	wrack	wurm

With attacks and abilities built right into the name, spelled out in ubiquitous damned adjectival compound nouns, a DM need only decide the creature's level range and role, and let 'er rip.

EDIT [in response to James Mishler]: The beauty of 4e is scalabilty, to wit

21

acid

crawl

bloodbeast

We'll eat you up, we love you so

Ending of the unpublished sequel to Where the Wild Things Are, in which a teenage Max, having sailed once again to visit the monsters who were once his friends and subjects, meets a grisly end -- hormonal changes brought on by puberty drive the beasts wild with hunger and he is swiftly dismembered and greedily devoured:

...the blood ran out over earth
and in and out of stones
and through the grass
and into the pile of his very own bones
where they had made a supper of him

and it was still hot.