Mercy Island (1941)

We are promised opalescent waters at the start of this drama, but all we actually get is a muddied hybrid of half a dozen stories with a group stranded on a remote Florida Key from where, in my humble opinion, they ought never to escape. “Ramsey” (Ray Middleton) and his wife “Leslie” (Gloria Dickson) are off chasing the marlin when their boat runs aground and the propeller gets lost. Together with the captain (Forrester Harvey), their tour guide (Bill Shirley) and the mischievous young “Wiccy” (Terry Kilburn) they set off into the interior where they stumble upon an house that has it’s very own scientist! This one isn’t bonkers, though, nor does he experiment on the local flora and fauna - in fact “Sanderson” (Otto Kruger) comes across as possibly the most sane of the bunch, only he does have a secret to hide. Now “Ramsey” is an aspiring lawyer so reckons he can take the doctor back to civilisation and secure his acquittal, but just about everyone else thinks that’s a daft idea. Is he going to go along with the consensus, or is it possible that he’s actually the one who is not the full shilling? The real question here is: why would we care? Aside from a little eccentricity from Harvey and the young Kilburn doing his best Johnny Sheffield impersonation the entire film belongs to a dog. In an area replete with alligators, I struggled from early on to discover where they were. Couldn’t they have saved us from this early on by eating most the cast and the crew? Perhaps they feared they were too chewy? They would not have been wrong! The rudimentary production includes some obvious archive photography, is seriously over-scripted and though the score was nominated for an Oscar, this rest is distinctly raspberry territory, sorry,