cult film freak: PETER LORRE WITH ROBERT WILCOX IN 'ISLAND OF DOOMED MEN'

Title: ISLAND OF DOOMED MEN Year: 1940 Rating: ***1/2

The pulpy tagline to the 1940 thriller ISLAND OF DOOMED MEN is "Women shuddering at his cruel caress" despite the fact only one woman, the wife of evil slave-master Peter Lorre, is on the titular island: and within their balmy plantation villa interior, he hardly touches or even speaks to her at all...

As classic beauty Rochelle Hudson quickly and understandably falls for handsome, dark-haired buried-lead Robert Wilcox, whose initial wrong-man story-line fits more into a deliberately-complicated film-noir beyond what's often mistaken as a horror flick (the plot heavily infused into Lawrence Tierney's jungle-traipsing KILL OR BE KILLED)...

Rochelle Hudson and Robert Wilcox in ISLAND OF DOOMED MEN

Following the MR. MOTO franchise as an anti-hero and his star-making turn as an endearingly antagonistic creep opposite Humphrey Bogart in CASABLANCA, Lorre seems to be doing a kind of leering imitation of the iconic he hadn't officially cemented... as most of the screen-time has Wilcox and fellow former American prisoners, who had gone from the frying pan into the ISLAND fire, planning an escape...

Making DOOMED MEN a kind of I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG adventure with a darker warden: only Peter Lorre (overshadowed by his far more uniquely-offbeat doppelganger George A. Stone) needed a larger dose of upfront villainy/viciousness for running such a nefarious operation.