On 22 June 2023, my movie watch was my big box ex-rental VHS videocassette, only purchased recently, of a nowadays largely-forgotten Filipino-American monster/horror movie from the early 1970s entitled The Twilight People and loosely based upon the classic H.G. Wells science fiction novel The Island of Dr Moreau.
Directed by veteran Filipino film director Eddie Romero, who also co-wrote its screenplay, and released by Dimension Pictures in 1972, The Twilight People (for some unknown reason, the 'The' was omitted from its title in my video's front cover artwork – more about that iconic artwork later – but not from its on-screen title) opens with the underwater kidnapping of scuba diver Matt Farrell. The movie's hero, he is played by John Ashley, a major American heart-throb actor and rock'n'roll singer during the late 1950s, who also co-produced this movie alongside the likes of Roger Corman.
Farrell is swiftly rendered unconscious and subsequently wakes up bound to a bed aboard a boat taking him to a remote tropical Pacific island. This island is inhabited by a maverick Nobel laureate scientist named Dr Gordon (Charles Macaulay), his beautiful, highly alluring, but sexually naïve daughter Neva (Pat Woodell), Gordon's sadistic Nazi-ish henchman/assistant Steinman (Jan Merlin), and a retinue of staff including a squad of armed guards. Gordon has chosen to live here, in a palatial home-cum-laboratory, after his radical experiments and his theft of massive amounts of funding swiftly led to his exile from the scientific community.
Speaking about Gordon's experiments: this island also contains eight other individuals – a benighted octet of mostly abducted humans who have been converted against their will into grotesque bestial humanoids no longer entirely human but not entirely animal either, in Gordon's crazed quest to create a race of super-human beings. Many reviews of this movie state that there are five of these beast-humans, these twilight people, but this is incorrect. Yes, there are five principal ones, but three others make brief appearances too.
The five principal ones are: Ayesha, the snarling, spitting Panther Woman (none other than Pam Grier!); Kuzma, the gentle horned Antelope Man (Ken Metcalfe); Darmo, the winged Bat Man, who can indeed fly (Tony Gosalvez); Primo, the hooting, arm-swinging Ape Man (Kim Ramos); and Lupa, the decidedly hirsute, lycanthrope-looking Wolf Woman (Mona Morena).
Additionally, in one scene showing these beast-humans caged in an underground cave where Gordon keeps them all prisoners, a sixth one is also briefly seen with them, a shy plume-headed, silver-costumed woman resembling a kind of half-human, half-bird entity. And just after Farrell is brought onto the island, there is a brief scene featuring an escapee beast-man named Dorro whom Gordon is trying to recapture alive with the assistance of his armed guards, but with his usual malevolence Steinman cold-bloodedly shoots him dead. When the beast-man's dead body is seen in close-up, it is revealed to have the tusked face of a wild boar. As for the eighth one – let's just say for now that she holds a very special, unique status…
SPOILER ALERT – Because I have yet to discover a detailed plot description online for this movie, I am providing one here, so if you'd rather not know what to expect before watching it, read no further!
Anyway, back to Farrell, who is informed by Gordon once installed in the latter's home that on account of his exceptional intelligence, knowledge, and physical attributes, this veritable latter-day Renaissance Man is to be utilized to engender Gordon's planned super-race, with his mind, brain power, and fitness to be transferred into each one of them. No details are given as to how such transference will be achieved, but it seems evident that however it is accomplished, Farrell will not survive the procedure, becoming a scientific martyr for the common good of future humanity as far as Gordon is concerned.
Moreover, as Steinman takes great delight in telling him, thanks to the island being a good 300 miles away from any other land mass, and patrolled by Gordon's squad, Farrell has no chance of escaping. Nevertheless, Steinman encourages him to attempt it, brazenly admitting that he would love the chance to pursue Farrell and kill him – and that's not all. As the story progresses, it becomes exceedingly obvious that blonde, blue-eyed Steinman has the hots for handsome, muscular Farrell, something that Neva loses no time in telling Steinman, inciting his fury – but he's not the only one in the Farrell fan club.
For Neva herself is too – she has spent her whole life on the island with her father in the absence of her mother, so until now she has never experienced what it is like to fall in love – but after Farrell kisses her while she is examining him in her trained medical capacity, all her pent-up passion explodes, she realizes the madness of her father's experiments, and vows to save Farrell from her father's dastardly plans. So the two of them plan their escape together, but Neva insists that the beast people are released and taken with them too.
When Neva attempts to free them from their cages in the cave, however, the bird woman refuses to leave hers and come with them but the other five do, and led by Farrell and Neva they make their escape into the jungle via a secret tunnel leading there from the cave whose existence is known only to Neva and her father. To give them a head start, Neva has drugged Steinman, but eventually he awakens, and sets off on their trail with an armed posse of the island's guards. Farrell, meanwhile, has told Neva that he is the person Steinman will be pursuing most emphatically, in the fervent hope of killing him, so their best chance of success is if they split up. Farrell convinces Neva to take charge of the beast people while he follows a different route to the coast, where they can then all meet up. What he doesn't tell her, however, is that he plans to return to the house, kidnap her father, and force him to come along, using him a hostage should Steinman and his squad track him down.
The rest of the movie focuses upon Neva's trek through the jungle with the beast people, and the various trials and tribulations experienced by them en route to the coast. These include: the Panther Woman ambushing and killing some of Steinman's men before deciding to do the same to the Antelope Man before he is rescued by the Wolf Woman who is friends with him; the Ape Man attempting to rape Neva before being warded off by the others; the Bat Man soaring through the jungle in quite spectacular fashion (the movie's only major special effect, the beast people having been rendered as such by little more than face masks and fake hair); and a stand-off confrontation by them against Steinman and his men that results in the latter's temporary capture of Neva.
As for Farrell and Gordon: at one point during their own jungle journey, Farrell ties him to a tree while investigating some movement in nearby foliage, but when after finding nothing he returns to the tree, Gordon is gone, the ropes having been mysteriously cut. Farrell also hears a strange, eerie, semi-human voice warning him that Steinman's men are near, which they are, but again he cannot trace who – or what – has warned him. Meanwhile, the confrontation between Neva and the beast people with Steinman and his men leaves only Neva and the Bat Man still standing. All of the others have been shot dead or killed by the beast people, and with all of these except for the Bat Man having themselves been shot dead too.
Finally, we see Gordon returning to his home, taking some important files out of a cabinet and fleeing back down the secret tunnel into the jungle – only to be seized when he emerges by a hideous humanoid entity shrouded in leaves, its face little more than a bloodied skull. This proves to be the eighth beast person, who was the very first one that Gordon had created – and guess who it is?? Read my review above again, the clue to her identity is there…
Anyway, this entity – the same one who had previously cut his ropes and had also warned Farrell of Steinman's men – now slays Gordon, whose dead body is subsequently found by Neva and Farrell. Afterwards, they sit together looking over the island, the last two fully human people left alive on it, and as they do so the Bat Man suddenly flies over their heads and soars through the sky, out across the island towards the sea, and beyond. And that's it, all over, The End, albeit quite an anti-climactic one.
There is no doubt that even by the early 1970s standards of monster and horror movies, The Twilight People very much falls into this film genre's low-budget B-movie category. Nonetheless, I found it to be immensely entertaining, and it very effectively elicits genuine sympathy for the beast people in light of their horrendous plight, while Macaulay's sinister mad scientist has more than a little of the Blofeld Bond villain about him. And speaking of villains, Steinman is evil incarnate, whose eventual demise is imho far too nondescript and merciful, regrettably, compared to what he deserves. Throw him unarmed to Panther Woman, I say, let her teeth and talons do for him!
As for Farrell: my problem with him was that in this movie John Ashley playing him bears an uncanny resemblance to English actor Kenneth Cope, who was most famous for playing the ghost in the very popular 1970s fantasy TV show Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), aka My Partner The Ghost as entitled when screened in the States. Consequently, when Steinman informs Farrell that because he has no clothes (having been captured while scuba diving in nothing but diving gear, remember), some new ones have been specially made for him, I was half-expecting him to appear dressed in an all-white suit! Equally, in view of Ashley's fame as a serious rock'n'roll singer coupled with this movie's rainforest setting, there was always the chance that he may suddenly give voice to Hank Mizell's 1958 hit song 'Jungle Rock', but sadly that didn’t happen either!
What did happen, however, which took me completely by surprise, is that during the music soundtrack (by Ariston Avelino and Tito Arevalo) accompanying Steinman and his squad's pursuit of Neva with the beast people through the jungle, a brief session of drumming suddenly, incredibly, segued into the unmistakeable theme 'Approaching Menace' – which is the iconic, menacing intro music to the BBC's cerebral UK TV quiz show Mastermind! And not just the music either, it was the exact same arrangement as in the latter show, and was periodically repeated throughout the remainder of the movie. Naturally, I'd always assumed that this piece of music, composed by English composer/conductor Neil Richardson, had been written specially for Mastermind, but its first series was screened in 1972, the same year that The Twilight People was released, so I'm mystified as to how this theme came to occur in both the TV show and the latter entirely-unrelated movie. Which featured it first? If anyone can explain this musical mystery, please post details below my review, thanks very much!
One last noteworthy aspect well worth highlighting here is as follows. Lovers of fantasy/horror artwork will no doubt have previously seen the very striking illustration that features on the front cover of my big box ex-rental video of The Twilight People – and for good reason. For it just so happens to be a cropped version of one of the most famous paintings produced by world-renowned fantasy artist Les Edwards – 'The Ghoul', which he created in 1979 (my video was released some years later by Atlas Home Video). As seen, it depicts the eponymous entity, whose extraordinarily lengthy arms have always intrigued me, emerging from some subterranean vertical tunnel or crypt inside what looks to be an Egyptian or some other Middle Eastern temple. Hence it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with The Twilight People!
However, this deceptive non-sequitur between the storyline of a video-format movie and the often highly-dramatic artwork depicted on said video's cover was a very frequent occurrence back in the bygone days of big box ex-rental videos, no doubt an artful (in every sense!) means of enticing punters to rent out such videos.
If you'd like to pay a brief visit to the nightmarish world of The Twilight People, be sure to click here to view an official trailer for this movie on YouTube; or if you'd like to watch the entire movie, click here, because it is currently available to watch for free on YouTube.
Finally: to view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.
