AutCuddly Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

Doomtomylo a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

PiraBit if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

Tymon Sutton The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

gridoon2018 Peter Lorre is the whole show here, and his soft-spoken line delivery is frequently awesome ("You should have remembered that I am a very light sleeper"), but he doesn't have much to play against; his favorite pastime is psychologically terrorizing his younger wife (Rochelle Hudson). The film is slickly produced (and the DVD print is in pristine condition), but the script is too simple, too pat; it doesn't have enough complications in it. **1/2 out of 4.

betsmith6 The basic story of Island of Doomed Men seems to be based on the true story of Narvassa Island. The main difference was in real life, the men were mining guano, not diamonds and they were black contract workers from the Balitmore area, not paroled convicts. Like in the movie, the men were treated brutally like slaves. This eventually led to an uprising with several of the overseers murdered. Some of the black workers were then put on trial for murder but when the true story of what was allowed to occur was publicized, they were pardoned by President Harrison. Narvassa Island, located between Cuba and Haiti, was designated a wildlife refuge in the 1990s.

rowboat Peter Lorre is perfect in this role, a calm, controlling madman with a terrifying temper bubbling underneath. Flashes of his temper are the highlights of the movie. Whomever played his wife could've probably been out-acted by a beanbag, but she's pretty, so it's ok. The other main man was okay, and I was rooting for him like I was supposed to. I guess the underlying question is: Could an island of slavery actually exist? Just kidding. The movie is not that deep, or worthy of further thought. The underlying question actually is: What does Peter Lorre have against monkeys?

dinky-4 G-Man Robert Wilcox goes "undercover" as "Mr. Smith" to expose brutal conditions on an island -- somewhere in the Pacific Ocean? -- where paroled men perform slave-labor in a mine owned by Peter Lorre. In the process, Wilcox falls in love with Lorre's wife, Rochelle Hudson, who's just as much a prisoner on Dead Man's Island as he is. Timed to run just over an hour, this tightly-constructed B-movie is a fine example of its genre -- brisk, efficient, and always entertaining, though it does take awhile to actually reach the island in question. As expected, Lorre dominates the proceedings with one of his trademark performances in which he manages to be both creepy and cultured, smooth and sadistic. He even adds a homoerotic undertone to his scenes with Robert Wilcox, particularly the one in which he watches a shirtless Wilcox being bound to a post in preparation for a late-night flogging. "Don't overdo it, Captain," Lorre warns the man with the whip. "There's a lot Mr. Smith ought to tell me and he may want to tell me before you finish. Oh, and be sure that he's able to work tomorrow." Curiously, Lorre departs the scene before the whip starts cutting into Wilcox's back, but you can be sure he'll derive a great deal of pleasure in thinking over the young man's pain and suffering. Incidentally, this is one of the few movies, (along with "Damn the Defiant!"), in which two men are given separate floggings during the course of the story. Earlier in the movie, Lorre oversees the flogging of a prisoner played by Stanley Brown. It's Wilcox's flogging, however, that is of real interest. Along with Alan Ladd's meeting with a cat-o'-nine-tails in "Two Years Before the Mast," this scene qualifies as one of Hollywood's most memorable floggings of the 1940s and it ranks 16th in the book, "Lash! The Hundred Great Scenes of Men Being Whipped in the Movies." Wilcox, of course, looks much too strong, determined, and virile to faint dead away after just fourteen blows with a whip, but his loss of consciousness provides a convenient way for the scene to come to an end.