Gun-toting babe Daly (Linda Blair) seeks revenge for the pain and suffering endured in a prison camp on a tropical island, where the prisoners are forced to dig for emeralds.
Linda Blair gets top billing and is front and centre on the poster for Savage Island, but the actress only appears in the bookend scenes, and provides an occasional voiceover to try and bring some kind of cohesion to the film's sloppy, central women-in-prison narrative, which has been clumsily edited together from footage from two older films - Escape from Hell and Hotel Paradise (both 1980). Penn Jillette, of Penn and teller fame, also appears in the opening scene, but don't expect him to bring any kind of magic to proceedings: he is shot in the head by Blair within the first minute or so.
Daly explains that, while the women of the island dug for precious gems, a gang of rebels planned to free the prisoners, but this plot-line is difficult to keep track of thanks to cruddy editing, diabolical dubbing, night scenes that are virtually pitch black, and because it is impossible to work out who are the good guys and who are the baddies (with at least one guy - the Tom Savini clone - apparently fighting for both sides). The bulk of the film consists of standard women-in-prison nonsense - communal showers, catfights, sadistic guards etc. - but even with frequent nudity from lots of young women (and transexual actress Ajita Wilson), and the occasional spot of violence, the film is still an unbearable dud.
The jungle bound action ends with the women and the rebels making a bid for freedom, pursued by the prison guards, which leads to some bloody bullet hits, and my favourite scene of the whole sorry mess: a girl falls into some water and emerges covered in leeches, so another of the women grabs a shotgun and blasts leech girl in the stomach, apparently to save her from an even worse death. I didn't even know that leeches were fatal.
The film concludes with Linda shooting the owner of the island with a machine gun and taking his fortune in jewels. How she smuggled an automatic firearm past the man's bodyguard is never explained (the idiot pays for his incompetence with his life - serves him right).
2/10. One of the worst WIP films I have seen.