Thanks for the memories!

Horrible, fascist and poorly acted

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Classic British exploitation with overblown melodrama, sex, nudity, violence, amputation, blood, an explosive climax, dynamite, mystery, thrills, chills, and lots of pretty British babes. Well and competently acted, this is clearly a groundbreaking slasher, as only The Bay Of Blood (1971) came first, while other more well known movies , Black Christmas (1974), The Hills Have Eyes (1977), and Friday The 13th (1980) all came later. This also one of the few over-the-top exploitation movies to feature inbreed nutjobs, at least in British cinema. I saw this movie at a drive-in years after its initial release and loved the gothic atmosphere of it. It's not great cinema, but it IS great fun. Well worth seeing for fans of the genre. I'm giving it nine stars because I have a soft spot for this flick, results for others may vary. Would not have been out of place in the old American pulps of the thirties and early forties. Get a couple of cold ones and just sit back and enjoy the mayhem.

As evil towers go, the one featured in this film certainly earns its stripes in the opening scene. Stabbings, spiders, dismemberment, naked corpses and lots of blood ensure our attention is immediately grabbed.So too are the familiar faces for the time – Anthony Valentine, William Lucas, Derek Fowlds and Dennis Price head a superficially impressive cast. Superficial, because the younger characters, the 'kids' are neither so well-known nor as compelling. Wrestling with dialogue that makes the excesses of 'Dracula AD 1972' positively conservative, these kids are a dull, casually randy bunch (the cod American accents don't help). The females are especially tiresome – as part of a group sent to investigate grisly murders on Snape Island, they are only ever concerned with the sexual failure of their partners and the affairs they plan to have. Who thought Free Love could be so spite-fuelled? One reason why the opening sequence is effective is because the island, and the waters surrounding it, are swathed in foggy darkness. Exposed to 'daylight', the cheapness of the sets and back-projection becomes hugely apparent. A cut-price film is no bad thing, but when the characterisations and plot is equally threadbare, attention falls away pretty quickly, despite the cackling killer-on-the-loose.The frank attitude to sex is surprising for a British 1972 film. The feeling I get is that Director Jim O'Connolly over-spiced the dialogue with references to sex and drugs in a bid to compensate for the lacklustre budget and plot. Despite an effectively fiery ending and the reveal of a secondary killer, the 90 minutes running time seems a lot longer.

After finding a terrified woman on the beach, the police's attempt to find the cause reveals her involvement in her friends' encounter with a savage killer and tries to help them combat the bloodthirsty maniac.This was a highly enjoyable and entertaining effort that really has some decent parts to it. The three-part narrative here manages to make the film seem a lot more involved than it really should be, taking different feelings and cues from the different story lines to create a well-meaning whole that is wholly enjoyable with the latter two stories giving this it's best parts. The recovery of the girl allows the flashbacks to plenty of nude dealings here with the different couples being stalked and killed off while usually engaging in amorous activities that display plenty of flesh throughout so there's a lot to like with that being done while apart of the film's best parts of utilizing the setting to maximum effect. Placing pleasing eye-candy in a wonderfully-realized Gothic setting of abandoned ruins, fire-lit rooms, fog-enshrouded walkways and plenty of dark, creepy hiding spots to be watched over and jumping out from makes for a perfectly chilling effort in these segments. The third story involving the research team is a little clichéd as it deals with the eventual appearance of the hermit-like creature as a total surprise even though it was used as a reveal back in the second one so the numerous stalking scenes here come off quite lame and counter-intuitive of what it's trying as it goes about doing all this set-up for a payoff already given earlier. Still, these are off-set by the excessive action and stalking done in the final half hour which is all sorts of fun with lots of brawling, traditional final-girl slasher-style confrontations and the ever-present Gothic trope of burning down the location at the end. It's all quite fun and really makes better use of it's screen-time than the rest of the segment as well as the first part of the film, which is just quite lame and confusing as it deals with the arrival of the hermit on the island and does nothing really enjoyable with it. Otherwise, this is quite enjoyable and certainly proves there's some worth to mixing the Gothic with the exploitation market.Rated R: Full Nudity, Graphic Violence, Language, mild sexual acts and brief drug use.

The plot = Two teenage couples arrive on Snape Island, to party and have sex, but not for long as they start to get victimized by an unseen killer who disposes the victims with an axe. One of the girls survives the massacre but is driven mad with fear and actually kills one of the sailors who tries to rescue her. As she's in a traumatised state, the police decides she's the killer, so the girls parents hires a private detective to travel to the island of doom to prove her innocence. He teams up a group of museum types, who believe that a temple for the Phoenician god called Baal resides in the caverns underneath the rocky island.I can across this little gem late one night on BBC 2, and not expecting much to come from this, well I was actually pleasantly surprised. This movie came out in 1972, and definitely sets the tone for what's to come later with the slasher craze that was to follow within' the next couple of years. The setting of the island is very dark and Gothic and sets the perfect tone and atmoshere. The effects are also surprisingly realistic for a movie this old particularly the headless body and the severed hand - are very realistic.Tower of Evil is fast-paced and entertaining, full of solid performances and shocks. But is also has many cheesy moments that undermine the atmosphere. And there are one or two cheesy moments like when the girl is the hospital in a special machine with disco lights, I mean thought that scene was hilarious. There are also red herrings, blood-lettings, occasional bouts of madness, explicit sex scenes, and the extended use of fast-cutting, with subliminal shocks.All in all a solid British slasher that has aged reasonably well, definitely worth checking out.